The Boy and the Heron (3/5 Stars)

I saw my first Miyazaki movie, Spirited Away, when I was in college. It had come out a few years before that and had won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature. It was part of a cultural wave that took subtitles into the mainstream. I thought it was a good movie without fully understanding it. A few years ago, I decided to watch it again, thinking that I would have a better grasp of what was going on within it. After all, I had twenty more years of life experience, saw many more movies, and had married a Japanese woman. The second time around, I understood it less than I thought it would. I still don’t quite get many parts of it. (Why is the furnace guy, half-spider?) I reread Roger Ebert’s review of it, and I don’t think Roger fully understood it either, but that wouldn’t stop either of us from admitting that it is a great movie. Sometimes, on a very basic level, you can just tell.

Indeed, having watched several of Miyazaki’s other movies and now The Boy and the Heron, it occurs to me that maybe these movies aren’t just replete with references that only the Japanese would know naturally. Maybe these movies are universally weird. It is hard to say.

Not that I can’t grasp the basics. I understand the basic emotional throughline. The movie takes place in the immediate aftermath of World War II. The boy’s mother died in a fire-bombing. After the war, his father moves his family to the countryside and he marries the sister. But the spirit of the mother still haunts the boy and this takes form in a strange building that is either a portal into another spiritual dimension, a temporal plane that takes place in the much distant past, and/or the product of space aliens. A grey heron, creepy and then funny, pesters the boy into following him into this fantasy land whereupon he happens upon many magical creatures and has several adventures. I think he succeeds in the end, in that sort of coming-of-age non-material maturation way.

I have a full knowledge of Aesop’s fables, greek mythology, arthurian legends, Grimm’s tales and other western folklore. I can only imagine that much of what is here might be references to past versions of Eastern folklore. The heron probably has some significance as may the carnivorous parakeets. But I do not know for sure. What I can tell you is that the movie is visually arresting, that it moves along at a fair pace and that there is always something to either marvel at or ponder over. The grey heron is a bit of a scene stealer, in particular, the way that it is animated so it is both an actual bird and some sort of costume for a small fat man.

In any event, I am very glad I saw it in a movie theater. And I’m pretty sure it would have been just fine without the subtitles too.