The Boy and the Heron Feels Like Miyazaki Saying Goodbye | The Backdrop (Patreon)

If one believes Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron will be his last film. Of course, this would be at least his third “last film”, behind Princess Mononoke and The Wind Rises. There’s some suggestion that this retirement won’t stick either. According to Studio Ghibli executive Juniochi Nishioka, Miyazaki is already batting around ideas for another movie. As Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki put it, “He is 82 years old, I think he will continue until he is 90 years old.”

Still, whatever Miyazaki’s intentions, there is a sense that time is finite. Careers can be ended by forces greater than retirement. Animator Takeshi Honda recalls being approached by Miyazaki to work on The Boy and the Heron, which involved being poached from the Rebuild of Evangelion. “I don’t have any more time,” Miyazaki told Honda. “Nobody in the Miyazaki family has lived beyond 80. This is probably going to be my last film, so you have to come on board.”

Age is catching up with Miyazaki, one of the greatest living filmmakers. His eyesight is fading, and his hands are not as dextrous as they once were. His productivity has slowed. According to Suzuki, in his prime Miyazaki would oversee seven to ten minutes of animation every month. On The Boy and the Heron, that rate fell to one minute of footage per month. Studio Ghibli had planned to release The Boy and the Heron in 2020, to coincide with the aborted Olympic Games. That did not happen.

Miyazaki is a famously exacting animation director. He is known to work late, and working for him can be extremely stressful. He is also known for his harsh corrections and for redrawing a lot of the animation assigned to others. For example, he redrew 80,000 of Princess Mononoke’s 144,000 frames. As producer Hirokatsu Kihara explained, “Miyazaki likes to put everything of himself and everything that he had into one film. But, when you’ve done that work, what’s left?”

The Boy and the Heron is a profoundly personal work for Miyazaki. A pamphlet accompanying the film’s release in Japanese theatres described it as an “autobiographical fantasy.” However, as the production went on, there is a sense that Miyazaki loosened his grip. During the pandemic, animators worked from home, outside the studio itself.

According to animator Toshiyuki Inoue, Miyazaki also “wasn’t as strict as before: he would approve drawings that wouldn’t have passed before just because he didn’t have the strength to correct them.” The character of Natsuko, in particular, is much more of a Honda design than a Miyazaki design. This isn’t to suggest that The Boy and the Heron is not a Miyazaki film, just that it evolved to become a lot more cooperative and collaborative than his films have tended to be.

There is a lot of Miyazaki in Mahito, the protagonist of The Boy and the Heron. The movie opens with the firebombing of Tokyo, recalling of Miyazaki’s earliest memories of childhood. “My first memories are of bombed out cities,” Miyazaki wrote in his memoir, Starting Point. Like Miyazaki, Mahito grows up in relative privilege; not only does the family own a car, they also have the petrol to run it. Miyazaki’s father ran Miyazaki Airplane, which made tail-fins for the Mitsubishi A6M Zero.

In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito’s father also designs parts for fighter jets. “It was funny because you can tell instantly that the character of Shoichi is his own father,” explains Honda. “And he would only show us actual photographs of his father after we had done a little bit of work. So I was like, ‘You could have shown this to us earlier!’ But it was very revelatory to discover what kind of person his father was by showing us that storyboard.”

Miyazaki’s mother was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis when he was a child, spending years bedridden and in hospitals. This seems likely to have informed some of Miyazaki’s later work, such as My Neighbour Totoro. She would recover, but she eventually passed away while her workaholic son was animating Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, which is retroactively considered the first Ghibli film. Throughout The Boy and the Heron, Mahito is processing the loss of his own mother.

Mahito leaves Tokyo with his father, and journeys into the countryside. He struggles to fit in, to accept his mother’s death and his father’s marriage to her younger sister, Natsuko. Investigating the property, he finds a strange tower. When his stepmother disappears, prompted by a mysterious and sinister heron, Mahito ventures into the tower. He discovers a strange world, overseen by a mysterious figure who may be his great uncle, a man “who read too many books and disappeared.”

This maps neatly to the founders of Studio Ghibli: Hayao Miyazaki, Toshio Suzuki and Isao Takahata. “Miyazaki is Mahito, Takahata is the great uncle, and the gray heron is me,” Suzuki recalls Miyazaki explaining. “So I asked him why. He said [Takahata] discovered his talent and added him to the staff. I think Takahata san was the one who helped him develop his ability. On the other hand, the relationship between the boy and the [heron] is a relationship where they don’t give in to each other, push and pull.” Understandably, the death of Takahata in 2018 changed the shape of the story.

“He was telling his own story at the beginning, and it was about the boy and the great uncle, with the great uncle character that was supposed to be the centerpiece,” Suzuki explains. “That character was based on [Takahata]. However, unfortunately, Takahata passed away during the making of the film, and that was very shocking for Miyazaki. For a long time, he wasn’t able to continue working on the storyboard, so we decided to change the centerpiece of the story from the boy and the great uncle to the relationship between the boy and the heron.”

As a result, the granduncle is largely missing from the first stretch of the film, only really becoming a key figure towards the climax, when it is revealed that he has been keeping this precarious imaginary world alive by stacking blocks. Realising that his time is coming to an end, he wants Mahito to take his place. Watching The Boy and the Heron, a story about a decaying kingdom held together a dying old man who has spent decades away from his family, it’s hard not to ask: What happens to Studio Ghibli after Miyazaki dies? It’s an important question, given the studio’s legacy and influence.

Miyazaki doesn’t seem too bothered. “The future is clear,” he stated in the documentary The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. “It's going to fall apart. I can already see it. What's the use worrying? It's inevitable. Ghibli is just a random name I got from an airplane. It's just a name.” In the wake of Miyazaki’s last retirement, Suzuki had to talk to the press to assure them that it “would be possible for [Ghibli] to keep making films indefinitely.”

However, the evidence doesn’t really bear that out. The company has struggled to find a successor to Takahata and Miyazaki. Miyazaki’s son Goro has stepped forward as a candidate, but his work leaves a lot to be desired. Attending a screening of Goro’s first movie, Miyazaki reportedly left for a cigarette break an hour in, stating, “It felt like I’d been in there three hours.” Offering his opinion on the movie, Hayao stated, “I saw my own child. He hasn’t become an adult. That’s all. It’s good that he made one movie. With that, he should stop [making movies].”

Ghibli was recently sold to Nippon TV, with the succession issue explicitly cited as the key factor. The studio’s future seems far from secure. With this in mind, the ending of The Boy and the Heron can be read as a metaphor. The granduncle is Takahata, but perhaps he is also Miyazaki. After all, The Boy and the Heron was animated linearly. Honda has talked about how Miyazaki was a much stronger influence on the film’s first half, with Honda driving the second.

“For the first part of the film, there was a lot of feedback and a lot of tweaking that Miyazaki-san did after I produced and delivered to him whatever I had done, so it’s much more to his taste,” Honda stated. “Whereas from the middle part onward, a lot more was left to my own devices. He would let me do whatever I wanted to do a lot more. So in that respect, you can see me kind of unconsciously reverting to my own style. You see a lot more of me in the latter half of the film.”

If this is the case, then there is something deeply affecting in the ending of the movie, in which Mahito refuses his granduncle’s offer to rule over this decaying kingdom. Perhaps Miyazaki is talking to his own successors, even his own son, asking them to do more than to just maintain his own legacy. After all, Ghibli’s influence extends beyond the company itself. Many of its artists have left to work at other studios, pushing the medium forward in their own way, outside Miyazaki’s shadow. Miyazaki clearly approves of Mahito’s refusal to live in his granduncle’s imaginary world.

The Boy and the Heron operates according to a dream logic. “I don’t think it’s possible to understand all of it,” Inoue stated. “Miyazaki himself said he doesn’t understand it all, so it’s not made to be understood.” And yet, even if The Boy and the Heron defies explanation, watching it does feel like coming closer to understanding Miyazaki himself. His son Goro has talked about his relationship to a largely absent and workaholic father, about “watching Hayao Miyazaki's works to understand my father.”

It is a two-way street. Miyazaki also makes movies to express himself. Suzuki talks about the film as a message from the animator to his descendants, “Miyazaki is making the new film for his grandson. It’s his way of saying, ‘Grandpa is moving on to the next world, but he’s leaving behind this film.'” The Boy and the Heron is a movie made by a man who has devoted his life to building imaginary worlds, lost in books and fantasies, about a child refusing to repeat that mistake. At the end of The Boy and the Heron, Mahito chooses reality instead of this fantasy life. The movie’s closing scene even finds him returning to Tokyo.

Maybe this isn’t just a message to Miyazaki’s own children and grandchildren. Profiling the director in the wake of Howl’s Moving Castle, journalist Margaret Talbot noted that Miyazaki “hates the idea that children watch his films repeatedly. He's very worried about kids consuming too much media, and thinks that they should watch a movie like Totoro no more than once a year.” The artist is “a big critic of our dependence on virtual reality—computer games, TV, and animation, too.”

Suzuki suggests that this is still the case, explaining, “Hayao Miyazaki and I are both very opposed to children watching Totoro over and over. You only have to see it once.” The Boy and the Heron feels like an old man reflecting on the life that he has lived and the worlds that he has built, hoping that visitors can glean some knowledge from them without becoming trapped. Mahito forgets the fantasy world as he leaves, the Heron telling him that “forgetting is natural.”

The Japanese title of The Boy and the Heron is How Do You Live Now?, named for a book Mahito reads in the film. It’s a movie about how life continues, and there is some comfort in that. “I wanted to convey the message to children that this life is worth living,” Miyazaki stated. That’s the thing about dreams and movies. Even if we forget the particulars, we carry them with us out into the world.