The Boy and The Heron

Hayao Miyazaki has retired again, and to celebrate I went to see his most recent final movie, The Boy And The Heron. Some people seem to hate it, but what did I think?

The Boi and The Birb had an odd marketing strategy, in that there wasn’t really one. In Japan, audiences got a single, mostly-inscrutable poster and absolutely nothing else, not even any images. Having seen the movie, I think I get why they did that: this is a film that spends its first twenty minutes or so playing keep-away with the basic premise of the story. Is it going to be a down-to-Earth historical drama like The Wind Rises, Miyazaki’s previous final movie? Or will it be a full-on fantasy spectacular like Spirited Away?

The movie opens with our protagonist, Mahito, arriving to the countryside after his mother died in the firebombing of Tokyo. His dad is operating a factory producing plane components and has a new wife, and the emotionally-withdraw Mahito is clearly not too thrilled with his new home and family situation. Things take a turn for the odd when the grey heron that lives on the estate starts stalking him, and he has flashes of what might be dreams or might be head injury-induced hallucinations indicating that his mother is somehow still alive somewhere. And then…

Well, then the movie reveals what direction it’s actually taking, and since studio Ghibli went to so much trouble to conceal that, I guess I won’t spoil it. The ambiguity is kind of a cheeky play on Miyazaki’s genre-hopping career, and while I’m not entirely sure if that was worth foregoing a marketing campaign over, it is a fun little wrinkle if you’re familiar with the director.

(There was a trailer for the English-language release, but even that didn’t give much away).

Once the movie reveals where it’s going and starts getting there, things get interesting. In order to explain why, I’ll have to lay out my philosophy of film critique. I call this The Ronan Theory and I expect it to quickly eclipse all other methods of film criticism by the end of the year.

The way I see it, there are four primary axes that a movie can operate on: plot, character, metaphor, and vibes. I believe those are the technical terms they teach you in film school. (I consider theme to be an emergent property of all four of the axes, rather than something that exists in its own right).

A good movie can operate along only one axis, but there’s a catch. The more it neglects the others, the better it will have to be at the axis or axes it does rely on. A movie that’s nothing but plot, with paper-thin characters, zero deeper meaning and a complete lack of vibes can be a great movie—but its plot needs to be really good. On the flipside, an entirely vibes-based experience must have truly immaculate vibes in order to make up for the lack of story, interesting characters or substance.

The Boy and The Heron operates for most of its runtime on vibes alone. There is technically a story, in that events proceed in a linear fashion and (sort of) connect to one another in the expected manner, but it is mostly just things happening for no real reason, or for reasons that are only brought up seconds before the events they’re explaining take place. Usually, when people say that it feels like a writer was making the story up as they went, they’re being at least somewhat hyperbolic. Here, I can say that with complete sincerity.

There are characters, but just barely. Mahito is emotionally repressed to the point that he spends most of the film in stoic silence. His step-mother is absent for most of the movie despite being a focal point of the plot. One of the most important characters in the film basically only shows up like 60% of the way through the story, if not later. The nominal villain takes even longer to be introduced.

As for metaphor…I’ll get to that a bit later.

So this is mostly a vibes movie, and my God, fans of vibes-based entertainment will consume heartily.

Unfortunately, describing what those vibes consist of is kind of a spoiler. I mentioned that the movie had an oddly opaque marketing campaign, but that extends into the film itself, which plays coy about what genre it even falls into for a surprisingly long time. Maybe too long. One of my few major criticisms about The Boy and The Heron is that the slow, sedate opening act overstays its welcome just a bit.

But eventually the movie shows its true face and the vibes begin and, again, they are spectacular. Much of it will be familiar to fans of Miyazaki’s past works, but there’s also plenty that’s brand new, including a strong undercurrent of Magritte-esque surrealism that I did not expect but was delighted to see. These elements make me dearly wish we had some way to de-age ol’ Hayao back into a strapping young man again, because I think it will kill me if he doesn’t get to explore these late-career visual concepts more. I’m begging you man, if you feel death approaching, put your ideas for your next movie in an artbook or something.

The vibes are carried along by Joe Hisaishi’s score, which I think might be one of the best he’s ever done. In a lot of ways it’s very different from his past Ghibli work, more stripped-back and “cinematic” to a degree that it often reminded me more of the kind of thing you’d expect to hear in a high-brow America blockbuster, but it lends the whole movie a majesty and weight that it would otherwise lack.

As I’ve stated on this blog before, the problem with vibes-based filmmaking is that unless you go 100% arthouse vibes-only, then you are eventually going to have to wrap up the story you’ve nominally been telling, and that’s where movies like this often fall flat.

This movie…

Well, this movie does something kind of amazing: it goes full metaphor. The movie’s cast cease to be characters with identifiable personalities and motivations and turn into philosophical chess pieces for Miyazaki to use in a passion play. Most of the dialogue in the film’s climax—to say nothing of the actual events that take place—is, objectively speaking, complete nonsense. The whole thing revolves around just-now-introduced magical rules that most of the cast don’t have any reason to care about. Almost none of it connects to anything that was happening for the other 95% of the story. Characters say shit that serves the metaphor at play, but which is completely meaningless from their own in-character perspective.

It’s incredibly sloppy. It’s like the scriptwriting process suddenly got hijacked by ghosts or something.

And it’s fucking great. The visuals are incredible, the metaphor itself feels huge and profound despite being extremely obvious, Hisaishi’s music pops the fuck off at just the right moments…it’s almost perfect.

Almost.

Here’s the thing, though. A movie can be good on only one or two of the Ronan Axes…but a great movie uses all four.

The Boy and The Heron is good in its current state, very good, but I can’t help but wish that it could have woven more of a concrete story and character development into the mix as well. In particular, there’s an element crucial to the movie’s climax that exists entirely along the metaphor axis; it’s a plot element introduced very late in the movie, and which has no setup or antecedent in the earlier story. I just feel like the movie’s climax would have been even more powerful if that plot element could have tied back to something from Mahito’s past or character growth.

So that’s The Boy and The Heron. Not Miyazaki’s best, but I definitely think it’s up there with his best.

But is it his best last movie? We’ll have to wait until he makes another one to find out.