Format: DVD from Cortland Public Library on basement television.
My original plan was to watch The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka if you want the original Japanese) on Sunday and post the review that night. Alas, I fell asleep about 45 minutes in. My follow-up plan, then, was to skip back a few minutes to the last thing I remembered and watch after my lectures on Monday night. And the same thing happened. I fell asleep again, managing to get to about the 1 hour 15 mark before I had no idea what was happening. I’d try desperately hard to focus, and five minutes later, my eyes would be rolling back into my head.
What does this mean? It means that evidently, despite how much I really wanted to like it, I found The Boy and the Heron to be the movie equivalent of Sominex. I like Miyazaki’s films as a rule, so this came not only as a surprise but as a supreme disappointment.
What’s the problem here? Bluntly, there’s far too much going on. We’re going to begin in Tokyo during World War II. Our protagonist Mahito (Luca Padovan—I watched the dubbed version) awakens to the news that the hospital where his mother works is on fire. Mahito’s mother dies in the fire. Soon enough, Mahito’s father Shoichi (Christian Bale) has married his late wife’s sister Natsuko (Gemma Chan) and gotten her pregnant. Shoichi and Mahito move out to the country where Mahito encounters a gray heron that leads him to a sealed tower, which is the last known location of Natsuko’s granduncle (eventually voiced by Mark Hamill).
Eventually, the heron (Robert Pattinson) starts, equipped with very human-like teeth, starts speaking to Mahito, telling him that he can take him to his mother. Mahito is nearly captured, but is saved by Natsuko with an arrow, which causes Mahito to create his own bow and arrow, which he fletches with feathers from the heron. Eventually, an ill Natsuko wanders off into the forest. Mahito follows her, along with Kiriko (Florence Pugh), one of the elderly maids at the house where they are all living now. Eventually, Mahito injures the heron, who is revealed to have a man living inside him.
This is not anywhere near as strange as things get. Mahito, Kiriko, and the Birdman sink into the floor and end up in an oceanic world where Kiriko has become a young fisherwoman, and pelicans attack everything around them. Spirits in this land, called the Warawara, eat fish and eventually rise up to the world above to be born as humans, at least until the pelicans attack—and this is prevented by the arrival of Himi (Karen Fukuhara), who has pyrokinetic powers.
And honestly, this still isn’t all. There are carnivorous giant parakeets in this world as well, and a wizard, who is actually Natsuko’s granduncle, who balances a series of blocks every day to keep the world spinning. At some point, The Boy and the Heron is filled with too many things, too many ideas to process, too much happening to keep straight. I simply got to the point where I was overwhelmed with something new popping up every few minutes.
Miyazaki retired after he made The Wind Rises in 2013, and aside from a short film he made half a dozen years ago, he hasn’t made anything else. The Boy and the Heron feels very much like it contains the concepts for three or four films. Had Miyazaki continued making films after The Wind Rises, it feels like a lot of the different aspects of The Boy and the Heron would have been the centerpieces of those three or four films. It’s overflowing with ideas and places and things and people and creature and concepts, and it never stops.
I am absolutely in the minority on this for feeling like The Boy and the Heron contains enough for three movies and feels like too much for one. I suppose that ultimately I liked this in the sense that, like everything from Studio Ghibli, it’s gorgeous to look at. The animation is lovely, as expected. It’s rich and beautiful, and I would expect nothing less.
I just wish that the story was one that I found interesting.
Why to watch The Boy and the Heron: Like all Miyazaki films, it’s gorgeous.
Why not to watch: It’s a soporific.