111. [Movie Review] The Boy and the Heron (2023): How do you live?
[Spoilers, if you are interested in watching the movie!]
I watched this movie in Japanese dub, but with English, Chinese, and Malay subtitles. It was a very lovely story and the animation was beautiful to watch. I think a lot of the meaning is lost when you watch the English dub, so I was glad that I listened to the Japanese audio during my first run. I will definitely watch the English version of this film. I need to see Robert Pattison's goblin voice acting...
Coming in, I didn't really know what this movie was about, only that The Boy and the Heron (2023) had a lot of autobiographical themes from Miyazaki's life. The nostalgia of all of his works were felt throughout the entire movie He modeled a lot of the characters from his family and his own life.
Cast
- Santoki Soma as Mahito
- Masaki Suda as the Heron
- Kou Shibasaki as Kiriko
- Aimyon as Himi
- Yoshino Kimura as Natsuko
- Takuya Kimura Shouichi
The main character, Mahito, leaves Tokyo with his father during WWII, after a firebombing kills his mother. His father has remarried to his mother's younger sister, Natsuko, who looks exactly like Mahito's mother did, and they go to live in her house in the countryside where Mahito's father works in a munitions factory (building jet fighters.)
Mahito is aloof and grows resentful of his new mom, his aunt, who is pregnant and soon to give birth. Mahito doesn't really want to make friends with his father's new wife, and also doesn't care to engage in conversation with the elderly ladies of the house. Instead, he becomes fixated with hunting a heron that lives on the property, and also is curious about a strange tower that looms behind the house.
On his first day of new school, he gets into a lot of fights, and on his way home he takes a rock and bashes his own head in. It leaves a big scar on his head and he has to stay in bed for a while.
Cue the fantasy. The heron starts talking to Mahito and goads him to follow him into the tower, claiming his mother is still alive in there. Mahito also witnesses a heavily pregnant Natsuko wandering into the woods near the tower, thus prompting all of the family to go looking for her.
Just like every Ghibli film, it was an artistic feast. It was wildly imaginative and I teared up watching. This film definitely had an air of finality deeply baked into it.
One of the best quotes and messages in this film: Forgetting is normal
We are so obsessed of remembering it all - the to point where we are vilified forgetting and moving on. When contemplating on how he going to end his legacy as one of the greatest animators of all time- Hayao Miyazaki simply made this movie. It was basically an accumulation of everything Miyazaki has gifted us throughout his entire career. If this is the epic goodbye, then I am completely satisfied with that.
I rated it 4.5 out of 5 on Letterboxd.
~ the girl and the blog,
<3 K