Mizayaki’s timeless tapestry
Somewhere near the end of The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, the 2013 documentary about Studio Ghibli co-founder Hayao Mizayaki, the great animator hints he is about to retire.
That hint has been dropped repeatedly since Ghibli’s Spirited Away came out in 2001. But retirement never really suited Mizayaki, who is now 82, as Ghibli unveils his latest feature film, The Boy and the Heron. That’s the Western name given to its Japanese title, How Do You Live?, inspired by a novel Mizayaki was given to read by his mother when he was a child. Don’t know how much of that novel survives in The Boy and the Heron, set in a Japanese coastal home far from the bombing during WW2, where young Mahito has escaped from Tokyo’s devastation after the death of his mother; he is sent to live with his engineer dad who supplies warplane cockpits in a nearby munitions factory and — crucially — is now married to his wife’s younger sister, Natsuko, who is carrying his baby.
Elements of melodrama always seem to present themselves on the surface of Ghibli films, but there’s always something more haunting underneath. Childhood memories linger over many of these films, like spectral whispers. For me, Hitchcock seems like an underlying inspiration, playing like a musical motif in films Mizayaki wrote and directed, like Spirited Away, but particularly others set in pastel seasides, such as When Marnie Was There. Then there’s Disney (the diminutive Seven Grannies in this latest).
In The Boy and the Heron, Mahito is tormented by memories of not saving his mother from a hospital fire during the bombing, and he’s constantly nagged by an enormous gray heron, to the point of self-harm (with a rock). Turns out, as in most Mizayaki films, there’s another world close at hand.
Even with strong personal memories and autobiography in the mix, The Boy and the Heron brims with Mizayaki’s typical cosmology—animistic and magical elements, like its depiction of elderly (half-)humans as dwarf-like creatures, to floating white creatures called Warawara that recall the Odama tree spirits in Princess Mononoke (they actually recall the Studio Ghibli logo even more), and a focus on time portals and the meaning of life. There’s the interplay of the grotesque and the beautiful, nature as delighter and tormentor (those crazy parakeets!).
Is it all in service of a twilight summing-up of a life, à la Kurosawa’s meandering Dreams or Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut? No. Mizayaki’s imagination is undiminished, even if some of these elements seem like retreads or carryovers from his earlier work. One must consider his films as a tapestry: he seems to, anyway, eschewing scripts and building up his features from evolving storyboards over years (this one was hinted at as early as 2016), personally overseeing every frame, along with the balance between hand-drawn panels and 3D effects. As always, his work is gorgeous to look at. (The English dubbed version features Robert Pattinson and Florence Pugh in key roles.) There’s a bit of an ecological emphasis, and a warning to humans to get their sh*t together to save a planet in peril.
All these elements feel familiar, and even as The Boy and the Heron wends towards an ending, you can’t help feeling that Mizayaki’s work exists in a timeless space, somewhere beyond trends and Ghibli’s success. Who will steer the studio when he does actually retire? It’s going to take a staggering team of innovators to reinvent not just the world of animation, but the world itself, once that time does come.
* * *
The Boy and the Heron is now showing in both Japanese-subtitled and English-dubbed versions, from Encore Films under Warner Bros. distribution.
