Oscar Wilde observes that only the very shallow don't judge by appearances. This is a trivial reversal of conventional wisdom, a paradox and provocation not worthy to be cited except in the context of Wilde's other adjacent thought on this subject. He goes on remark that that the mystery of mysteries is that the world is visible and that it's beauty is accessible to us. The invisible is uninteresting; it is the things that we can see with our eyes that should fascinate us. This opinion, I think, is integral to any understanding of Hidao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron (2023) a late masterpiece by the Japanese animator. (The film is released through Miyazaki's Studio Ghibli, a company that has been involved in most of Miyazaki's pictures, all of which are cartoons -- although that term seems inadequate to describe these films.) Astonishingly beautiful and precisely, even scientifically, observed, The Boy and the Heron seems to me to be indisputably a masterpiece of animation; it is not, I think, a masterpiece of film art because of its convoluted, arbitrary and capricious narration. By far, the best part of the movie is its first half-hour devoted to establishing a realistic setting and the picture's spooky haunted-house premise. The more spectacular and lavish last two-thirds of the movie is more than a bit gratuitous and self-indulgent, although the images that Miyazaki and his army of animators produce are frequently astonishing and memorable.
Set during the third year of World War Two, the film begins with a bravura sequence in which the titular boy, an eleven-year old named Mahito, observes a huge fire in which his mother, a nurse, perishes. This sequence is remarkable in many respects -- the fire is heralded by flakes of burning soot that are widely distributed throughout the frail paper and wood city of Tokyo. Miyazaki depicts the precise motion of these embers as they gently sift through the air. We see the boy, Mahito, in a white quasi-naval uniform, running through the disturbed crowd to reach the hospital that is engulfed in cascades and torrents of flame, the fire gushing sparks into the sky. This is all literally breathtaking. (Miyazaki doesn't want to compromise his hope for the film to be seen by an international audience and, so, he doesn't ascribe the fire to Allied bombs -- it seems to just happen.) To avoid the war that is pressing ever more urgently on Tokyo, Mahito is sent to the idyllic countryside where his father has remarried, apparently, the sister of his wife, the nurse who perished in the blaze. (On the way to the countryside, we see the smoke from the locomotive chugging across the verdant landscape and, then, in the village a procession of new recruits for the war, surely the saddest, most hapless parade of misfits ever conscripted. Mahito's stepmother is kind, gentle, and pregnant. She lives in a traditional Japanese mansion, a sort of palace that looks like something designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. (The place is staffed by crones who are clearly liminal beings, hags who have supernatural power that they use as good witches.) Beneath the verdant hill, there is a factory operated by Mahito's father -- it's never entirely clear what is being made in the factory, but the place's production seems to involve armaments and, perhaps, kamikaze planes. (In one remarkable sequence, laborers bring onto the palace premises, dozens of elegantly shaped cockpit assemblies that are, at once, modernist works of art, but, also, transparent coffins or caskets, both beautiful and sinister.) There is a gothic aspect to the palace and its adjacent buildings. Near the mansion, a pagoda-like tower looms over a bamboo grove and lagoon; the pagoda was once the library of a great-uncle who has mysteriously vanished. The entries to the tower are clogged with rubble and debris and there are said to be secret passages underground. A big heron, initially drawn like one of Audubon's birds, a majestic grey creature with a huge wingspan nests in the eaves of the abandoned and decrepit library. As the film progresses, the heron, a spirit-guide, becomes increasingly grotesque and monstrous -- at one point, the creature looks like a ravenous pterodactyl with jaws full of human teeth. (And, it turns out that one avatar of the heron contains an ugly, bald-headed dwarf with a huge nose and big equine choppers.) The heron, simultaneously a god and a beast (it deposits excrement all over the windowsill in Mahito's room) summons the boy to explore the passages leading into the abandoned library. Of course, these passages turn out to be portals into not one alternate universe, but a multiverse, accessed through a long corridor in which individual worlds may be entered through numbered doors that open to those traversing the hallway. Behind each door, apparently, there is another, completely different universe. Mahito ends up in a sea-world, a vast expanse of water with islands that look like Arnold Boecklin's sepulchral isle of the dead, a rocky archipelago with funeral cypresses growing from honey-colored boulders in a blue sea full of ghost ships, big galleons that move silently over the waves; the sky is limpid and vast with colossal clouds tinted like a painting by Maxfield Parrish. As it turns out the sea-world is governed by Mahito's great-uncle who is powerful wizard. A pirate boy guides Mahito through the cluster of islands. An example of Miyazaki's fertile imagination, too lush, in fact, for any sort of coherent narrative structure, is an episode involving Warawara beings. These are spectral white puffs with eyes and a notional mouth, a bit like radiant luminaries -- they rise in huge glowing clouds into the night sky, flocks of them driven upwards like sparks from a fire. The Warawara beings are souls venturing into the sky to be born in some other universe. A vast flock of pink, repellent-looking pelicans soars among the luminaries, devouring them on their way to inhabiting some other body in some other place. A fire maiden who jets around on spirals of flame attacks the pelicans and sets them afire. It appears that the pelicans are the villains of this world, greedily devouring the souls seeking to be born. The valiant fire-maiden is an incarnation of Mahito's mother who perished in the flames. In a later scene, Mahito comes upon a horribly injured pelican, dying next to a sort of dolmen altar. The pelican tells us that there is nothing for his kind to eat except the Warawara and that their only hope for survival is to make due with that prey -- the creature speaks in a dignified way despite his injuries and, then, dies. Mahito impressed by the courage and dignity of the pelican, finds a shovel and digs a hole as a grave for the "noble animal." This element of the complex story illustrates a key point in Miyazaki's cosmos -- creatures that we think are evil turn out to be virtuous; similarly, animals that are beautiful, graceful, and benign harbor a dark side and can behave in a wicked way. The film's ambience is a bit like Mozart's Magic Flute: characters portrayed as frightening and dangerous turn out to be beneficent while others that have impressed us as kind are sinister and malignant.
Mahito's quest through the sea-world universe involves his pursuit of his stepmother who has wandered into the labyrinth of universes to give birth to the hero's stepbrother. Miyazaki populates the film with all sorts of monstrous beings, yokai to use the Japanese term for these figures. Mahito is frequently overcome by swarms, living avalanches of frogs and fish, pelicans, and parrots. (The parrots in particular are carnivorous and as big as adult human beings -- they conceal knives behind their feathery tails and have set up pots in which to boil their slaughtered prey. When Mahito is buried in a flock of the vicious parrots on one of the thresholds between worlds, the creatures shrink as they exit from one universe to another, entering our world as harmless little parakeets or "budgies" as they are called.) Mahito's stepmother is giving birth in a chamber in the sea-world decorated with rings on which thousands of small paper scraps are suspended. (I have no idea what this is supposed to represent). The scraps of paper become animated and Mahito is entangled among them, ensnared as if in the wrappings that shroud him like a pale white mummy. The plot makes sense scene by scene but it is wholly without any real structure or narrative logic -- it's just one damn thing after another. The notion of plethora which governs the scenes involving swarming fish and frogs and fowl applies equally to the narrative -- it's simply too much of a good thing. The film's congested and intricate plot-line reminds me of some of the more demanding novels by the great E.T. A Hoffmann -- books like The Golden Pot or The Princess Brambilla in which supernatural events involving disguised characters (most of whom turn out to be related to one another) collide with one another in a wild, fragmentary explosion of narrative -- you can't sort out who is doing what to whom, nor can you keep in mind why such things are happening. Magical events in The Boy and the Heron proliferate endlessly and the narrative keeps regenerating from one climax to the next; the film embodies in its plot the notion of multiple universes only tenuously tethered together. One example will have to suffice for dozens: at one point, the plucky hero, having observed the fire maiden shooting flaming arrows into the swarming heron-monsters, makes his own bow from green bamboo. He, then, forges an arrow and fledges it with the "number seven" feather dropped from the gray heron. This creates an arrow that can turn and twist and reverse its course in mid-air to pursue its target. Miyazaki shows the arrow engaged in multiple aerial acrobatics as it chases it's prey. This is a spectacular narrative motif, animated with virtuosic skill, and, of course, presents a fairy-tale weapon of particular power and efficacy. But after a scene featuring the magic arrow, Miyazaki's scenario simply abandons this plot device: the unerring arrow that always finds its target vanishes from the movie.
Miyazaki is elderly (83) and had announced his retirement with his penultimate film, The Wind Rises (2013). I suspect there is an element of autobiographical revelation in The Boy and the Heron. In one early scene, some malicious boys beat up Mahito on his first day of school in the country. Walking home, Mahito is seized with a sudden impulse to mutilate himself. He picks up a sharp stone and bashes in the side of his temple creating a deep wound that, apparently, scars him for life. In the sea-kingdom, the wizard (Mahito's great-uncle) offers the boy the opportunity to become the ruler of this magnificent and beautiful universe. The wizard tells Mahito that he failed at ruling the realm because he was bitter and malicious. Mahito rejects the wizard's proposal pointing to the scar on his temple as evidence that he too is bitter and malicious and, therefore, unsuited to rule this universe. Miyazaki is a wizard himself, of course, a sorcerer who works making lavishly detailed and painterly animated cartoons. I have the sense that this scene is an admission that the much-loved film-maker has created his art out of wounds in his own psyche, presumably incurred during the War years, that have left him also embittered and afflicted with some kind of hatred toward his fellow man. No one is perfect enough to rule the gorgeous landscapes and legions of strange and beautiful creatures that inhabit Miyazaki's films. But The Boy and the Heron frame by frame and scene by scene is a great gift -- every shot discloses foliage in motion, insects in the grass, dragonflies so precisely imagined and portrayed as to portray specific identifiable species. In a movie comprised of photography, the audience sees what happened to appear before the camera's lens -- clearly, there are elements of even the most carefully contrived and controlled movie that are accidents, artifacts left by the light or by incidental things that invaded the shot. But everything in Miyazaki's film is intended because drawn; every quirk of the light, every drop of rain, every shadow moving in dance-like concert with wind in the leaves or the flight of a great bird that looks like strokes of Japanese calligraphy -- all of these things are gifts of the purest sort, because they were drawn and, then, laboriously animated to give them life.
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