After his mother disappears in a fire, an 11-year-old boy must leave Tokyo to live in the countryside with his father in an old mansion where he meets a heron who becomes his guide in his attempt to unravel the mysteries of life .
The 12th feature film and announced swan song of Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron, is the culmination of a giant of the seventh art. A splendor of an animated film, magnificently produced, whose images, characters and motifs recall both the filmmaker’s older works (Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro) and more recent ones (Spirited Away , Ponyo). Evoking the dark Susuwatari from Spirited Away, the Warawara are small, whitish, bubble-shaped creatures that rise to the sky to be born as babies.
We also find in The Boy and the Heron, freely inspired by a 1937 novel, And you, how do you live?, by Genzaburô Yoshino, all the elements (and not just the four main ones…) which made the style and reputation of Miyazaki and Studios Ghibli. The emotions of childhood, mourning, transmission, ecological and humanist discourse, and of course, fantasy.
Mahito, an 11-year-old boy, leaves Tokyo during World War II after his mother dies in a fire at the hospital where she works, for the village where she grew up. Near the mansion where he lives with his father, he meets a very peculiar gray heron – he speaks, to begin with – who will guide him to an intriguing tower and reluctantly become his guide into parallel and supernatural universes, in search of meaning. to give to life.
A friendly or enemy heron? It’s not clear. Miyazaki immerses us in an initiatory and existentialist tale which alternately takes on the air of a phantasmagorical dream and an apocalyptic nightmare.
Ten years after The Wind Rises, the 82-year-old filmmaker once again demonstrates all his mastery. The sumptuous animation of this pacifist fable with hints of Alice in Wonderland is of dazzling formal beauty. The story, dreamlike and poetic, complex and rich, stands out for its intelligence and subtlety, with strong metaphors on war, the destruction of the environment and the passage of time. Without ever falling into Manichean or moralizing discourse.
It is, like Miyazaki’s entire filmography, a film of astonishing inventiveness and boundless imagination, strong enough for us (adults), but designed for them ( children), to borrow the phrase from a 1980s deodorant advertising campaign. The Boy and the Heron is perhaps not to be classified among Miyazaki’s masterpieces in the same way as My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away, but it is an equally precious stone in the building of a remarkable filmography. The last legacy of an immortal giant.
