Editor’s Note: This review originally ran as part of our coverage of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival. Check out our extensive review slate of TIFF 2023, revisit our official preview and complete archives of prior editions.
After an extremely productive three decades of filmmaking, it looked like Hayao Miyazaki was practically finished with the medium. His last release, The Wind Rises, was unlike a lot of the more fanciful and fantasy-oriented pictures he’d put out over the course of his career – Miyazaki tended to support artists who made more realism-oriented anime through his producing but only moved to make one of his own in 2013. It was a treatise about the perversion of beautiful things and about a creator coming to terms with the fact that his innovations remained beautiful despite how they were used. It’s hard not to read the movie as about Miyazaki’s own legacy: The man hates a good deal of modern animation, as anyone who has seen the thousands of memes that emerged from The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, a documentary about Studio Ghibli’s output from 2013 and 2014, can attest. If it were to be a parting shot, it would have been one hell of a final message. But Miyazaki, who is the anime equivalent of Brett Favre, decided to make one more film after considering retirement and announced that this film would be his last (and, of course, immediately after it premieres overseas, he announces he’s doing another movie before he calls it quits). He also essentially stealth-dropped The Boy and the Heron into Japanese theaters, doing as little PR or advertising as humanly possible to, and I’m paraphrasing here, “recapture the feeling that [he] had as a child and the mystery that came along with seeing only a poster before entering a theater.”
This ethos is genuinely fitting for a movie like The Boy and the Heron, which is by far his most autobiographical and personal film, and I’ll try to respect the master’s wishes, even if his stateside distributor can’t for very understandable reasons. So, beyond the most limited of summaries, you’ll have to discover what magic awaits you in his latest masterpiece for yourself later this winter. Of course, you don’t have to watch the trailer, do internet deep-dives, or even read this review (but please at least stay on the page for another minute or two before clicking out), but you can’t help it if your local theater shows a trailer in front of Paw Patrol or something. But here goes: After a kid loses his mom in the firebombing of Tokyo, his father, a businessman running one of the factories building airplanes for the Japanese war machine, moves the both of them out to the countryside. His father has married his mother’s sister, who looks as if she were an exact copy of her departed sibling, and lives in a pastoral country estate in the middle of the woods, surrounded by old maids and servants. He finds himself greatly depressed, even if the beauty of the land calls to him. But a blue heron – a trickster entity wearing an animal suit – winds up provoking him, drawing the boy into a quest to try and save his mother. He descends into a mystical world-between-worlds, inhabited by all sorts of creatures, and will learn the destiny planned for him, perhaps finding some sort of healing for his wounded soul. And that’s all I’m going to tell you.
One could copy-paste the usual laurels deservedly heaped on Miyazaki and the animators at Ghibli if they wanted: It is gorgeously lush in its imagery, playful in its humor, devastating in its emotional impact, and full of the detail that made the master a worldwide phenomenon. But there is an interesting element that makes The Boy and the Heron worthy of study, and that’s how vastly it resembles The Wind Rises in its thematics yet with a kind of opposing view. If that film oriented itself around Miyazaki’s own struggles with his legacy – or the legacy of any artist who finds their work appropriated by its audience for untoward ends – this film is about finding the joy that remains, and it attempts to recapture the spirit that he felt as a young man, descending into a world of dreams that only he could realize. It acts as a treatise about the cultural stew that anime emerged from, the ether of dreams that sustained a generation through devastation that they themselves attempted to share with the world once enough time had passed. But Miyazaki has never shied away from pain in any of his works, which makes them all the more potent, and gives this film an added weight. Tragedy glimpsed from his young eyes brought him to try and find the beauty present in the world and, through his fantastic inventions and imagination, led him to share these dreams with the world in hopes of shared connection. This prevents the film from curdling over into the kind of onanist nostalgia-fest that filmmakers frequently succumb to, and this is done in a film that never references its medium explicitly.
Would it be fair to say that Miyazaki has again found joy in his art? The burden of his dreams has lightened, and magic, tempered by a clear-eyed vision of depths of human emotion, both light and dark, once again fills every single frame unabashedly. There will be, of course, a day in which Miyazaki actually does release that last film, with undoubtedly more grace and honor than, to complete the metaphor, a ball directly towards Tracy Porter at the end of the last playoff run. But The Boy and the Heron shows that Miyazaki’s work isn’t finished, even as it serves as a hopeful capstone to the kind of career that every would-be director dreams of: There are more worlds left to explore in the halls of imagination, with unimaginable beauty just waiting to be uncovered and witnessed through Miyazaki’s eyes.