When you set out to make a final work, it always goes differently. What comes up first is the turmoil of making anything. The process is hard and making the final statement must be the hardest one of all. You can imagine the spiritual relief of finishing not just a work of art but the final one. The last statement. A swan song to a principled filmography of your own design. This final movie, by the necessity of self-reflection, must then reflect a lifetime of work. It is a last signal to the workers who help accomplish the vision. We are putting all of our chips on the table and there are no mulligans. This is it.
Such weight surrounds the making of The Boy and the Heron, the last — but probably not final — film by Studio Ghibli chief architect Hayao Miyazaki. This is a gift to the world, a conclusive transmission from artist to audience that says, here is what I have learned and know about life and want to teach you and show you about life.
This is a study of how to live, previously more appropriately titled How Do You Live?, that title reflects in a real way what the movie is asking the audience. How do you live? An open-ended philosophical question to which the film provides some answers but no solutions. You live by being and by doing, by being a part of something bigger than yourself, by the connections you have made, and by what you leave behind.
What Hayao Miyazaki has left behind — whether or not there is another movie, this will be the late-era movie that is looked at to explore his filmography — is an entire world of cinema unto itself. This critic remembers the total shift in life experience (experience, not just in moviegoing) that accompanied my first theatrical exploration (exploration, not just watching a movie) that came with watching Spirited Away (2001).
The way that went is that I was transformed, in precise and equal ways, just as the character of the movie was transformed. I’m not sure I have seen another animated movie that gave me an equal spiritual journey until now. We talk about movies we love as shifting who we are, as vessels of storytelling that we then must carry with us, as defining facets of our new personality. How there is the us that exists before the movie and the us we walk out of the movie being.
That’s what The Boy and the Heron feels like, a transformative stage of life that we must experience on its own terms, as our conceptions about movies erode and we allow the movie to lay down a new path. The best animated cinema is one such pathway of imagination and human experience and the best practitioners of the format understand the gravity (and ungravity) of working in such a fluid, dynamic fashion.
The dynamic is altered when Hayao Miyazaki approaches cinema as a wisened Octogenarian and tells us what he knows. You can no longer confuse animation as a toy or a corporate vehicle for on-brand messaging. Because here the animation can expand to any wider definition of what cinema can be, as animation as a medium is given a new lease on life by the sensation of the end closing in.
The Boy and the Heron takes its time. It is a slower cinema. We establish spaces and places and the characters in them must also be established not just through the lens of expert animated storytellers but through the history of Japan and its movies. There is the same tender cultural richness at its heart, a love for life, and joy in its discoveries, that uplift the spirit and allow new dimensions to be explored, without ever just being a movie about new dimensions.
Studio Ghibli will often use nature and grotesque creations to create lasting, memorable character moments. They have applied this approach with the Heron, who is an old man trapped inside a bird, and through the use of frenzied parakeets who serve as such gorgeously illustrated villains, these birds are both some of our finest cinematic creations.
The story is about a young boy called Mohito (Mahito Maki), who explores a land shared by the living and the dead. Here, Hayao Miyazaki self-inserts: he uses his own character and vision of the world to explore how the end is the start of something new. Death is the start of being dead. The end of life is exploring, for the first time, what the end is like. How we live in the meantime determines how we will experience the end and what we have the capacity to see.
Monumental symbolism lines the frames of The Boy and the Heron. We feel inside its cells, the journey of Hayao Miyazaki through life and through cinema. This is an autobiography ingeniously made in a different model and it can only be an animated film. There is no other way to accomplish what is accomplished here. Only in the stories of Studio Ghibli. Our presentation was of the original Japanese language version but a starry cast, as expected from the studio, highlights the forthcoming translated version. Whichever you see, just be sure to see it.
This is the start of the end. As such, it feels like a new beginning. The movies will always be with us. Now we have another key text to absorb and understand them in a new way. Whether we get another film from Hayao Miyazaki is almost beside the point. In the meantime, we just have to think about how we live. Good news for us is we have a guidebook for how one of cinema’s most venerated workers sees life. And now we will see life differently, too.