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The return of Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki represents one of the most beautiful surprises of the cinematic year of 2023, with the showing of his latest film, “The Boy and the Heron,” which he worked on with a team of 60 animators for seven years, and received a wide cinematic showing around it. The world, whether on regular screens or IMAX.
Recently, the film won the Golden Globe Award for Best Animated Feature, which is the first time that a hand-drawn work in a language other than English has won. The film is expected to compete strongly for the Oscars this year, especially with the weakness of American films shown during 2023.
A new return to the director’s childhood
Miyazaki extracted fragments from his personal life and childhood and made them the focus of his films throughout his career. He lived a life rich in momentous events that deserve to be delved into, and to produce these artistic masterpieces that the audience has become attached to from the 1980s until today.
The director was born during World War II, and went through his adolescence in post-war Japan and the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. His mother died when he had not yet passed childhood, leaving him alone with his father, who was busy with his work in a military factory.
“The Boy and the Heron” is a new return to this childhood. It begins with the boy “Mahito,” whose mother died during a hospital bombing, and whose father works as an engineer in a military factory, and who married again to his ex-wife’s sister. Fearing for his life, the boy moves to the countryside to live in his mother’s family home with his aunt, who is pregnant with a new baby, and the rest of the family and servants.
A vortex of conflicting emotions ripples inside Mahito; A lot of sadness and anger over the death of his mother, longing for this mother and the type of family he was accustomed to, and guilt towards the aunt who tries to communicate with him in various ways, but he closes the doors in her face in a polite and strict manner, while the sounds of war roar outside.
The straw that threatens Mahito’s attempts at cohesion – even if only on the surface – comes at the hands of a giant heron that lives in the forests behind the family’s home. It contradicts logic and speaks to him, stressing the need to search for his dead mother, who is still alive, which sends the boy into fits of rage. An intense attack that makes him try to kill the bird.
One day, the aunt disappears near the tower that one of his ancestors built a long time ago and is surrounded by terrifying legends. The boy is forced to follow her and bring her home, but instead he enters a magical world parallel to his real world, and in it he embarks on an adventure that he did not imagine was possible, which not only revives his soul. And his imagination, but it makes him communicate with his ancestors, his mother, and his aunt in a new way.
The viewer who loves Miyazaki’s films will not miss the similarities between “The Boy and the Heron” and his previous films. We find the loss of the mother or concern for her health intersecting with the movie “My Neighbor Totoro” and the parallel world that carries its own laws and during which the child protects his family members from… “Spirited Away”.
These connections with previous films do not mean that the director’s world is limited to his personal life and concerns. Rather, he is able to reread himself as an individual within a larger society with whom he shares concerns and fears, and he was able to transform them into a very rich art that reaches everyone around the world despite the difference in language and culture.
The choice between the pain of life and the sweetness of imagination
The beginning of the life of Hayao Miyazaki’s generation witnessed the greatest shock that occurred in Japan. They grew up fearing for their relatives and loved ones, and the director chose to escape from this ugliness into imagination. He created parallel cinematic worlds and made his young heroes embark on their journeys of survival in them. The two girls in “My Neighbor Totoro” find support from a giant imaginary being, and “Mahito” in “The Boy and the Heron” meets his mother again in her childhood in this world, and tries to come to terms with the idea of losing her, and to regain the pregnant aunt he almost lost.
But the end of the film raises a different question. Unlike the other heroes, each of whom was ultimately destined to return to the ordinary world; Mahito was given the freedom to choose between the two worlds, his real world of war, fear and pain, and survival and rule of the imaginary world, in which he could make his own rules and stay with his mother.
It is as if the director is also giving the viewers the same two options; The first is life with all its pain, or escaping into imagination, with the comfort that that certainly brings. But he leaves the parentheses open to determine the type of this imagination. Is it the world of literature and books that Mahito’s grandfather delved into and made him build this tower and then disappear in it, or painting and films as Miyazaki himself did, who created completely different cinematic worlds, and by extending the line straight we will find A third option is the virtual world and social networking sites that give people the ability to build an imaginary life for themselves and distance themselves from reality.
Miyazaki gave the choice to Mahito, as well as to every viewer, and the hero’s final speech clarifies the point of view of the director who chose the pain of life over the sweetness of imagination. This pain carries within it its own beauty. The torment of separation comes because of the sweetness of love, and the boy cannot abandon both of them. And escape from life.
The director’s creativity is evident in the way he draws both worlds. While the film begins with the scene of the bombing of the hospital in which the hero’s mother died, with the violence and cruelty it entails, we find the image of the imaginary world very sweet, especially in drawing the white, flying creatures of “Alwar Wara” and the birth room where his aunt resides. .
The film “The Boy and the Heron” may be Hayao Misaki’s last work, and perhaps for this reason he made the hero’s choices clear and specific and not as open as his other films, as if he was giving current and future generations advice from an octogenarian who experienced living during a very ugly war. Although he is a professional fantasy maker, he ultimately chooses reality.
