Anime Fever hits India again with ‘The Boy And The Heron’ Release
By Manher Kaur
To call Studio Ghibli’s The Boy And The Heron beautiful would be an understatement; its later release in theatres was a watershed moment for anime in India, not only because it won Best Animated Feature Film at the 96th Academy Awards but also since Hayao Miyazaki came out of retirement to win his second Oscar.
In Miyazaki’s most personal work yet, the protagonist, Mahito Maki, born a decade before his creator, actually mirrors Miyazaki’s real childhood. Right from the beginning of the film, where Mahito loses his mother in the hospital fire, it evokes personal parallels with Miyazaki’s loss of his mother. Although it may be labelled as a coming-of-age story about a 12-year-old boy living through the Pacific War in Tokyo, it sent out a different message. To grieve. To let go.
While the English title of the film might simply give you a brief overview of the film before jumping right into it, its Japanese title translated as ‘How do you live?’ exemplifies Miyazaki’s faith in a child’s potential to surpass previous generations and forge a better path. That perfectly explains the question posed: This is how Mahito lived — How do you?
And what better way to show that than with its stunning hand-drawn animation? The animation that took 60 animators to painstakingly draw one minute a month.
When Mahito, along with his father, Shoichi, shift to the countryside, still struggling to grieve his mother’s loss, he is roped into a new life — one in which he has no will or wish to live. With Mahito’s mother’s existence re-fabricated when Shoichi decides to marry his late wife’s sister, Natsuko, he decides to simply pick up a rock one day and crack his head open with it.
As the title may suggest, the film eventually turns into a story about Mahito and his companionship with a malicious creature, the grey heron. Even as the titular character, the heron flies in and out of the story. In one of their initial encounters, the very peculiar talking heron entices Mahito with promises of his mother being alive. Appearing to be some sort of mystery throughout the film, the heron lies and leads Mahito to enter the fantastical world but he still turns out to be faithful in the latter part of the film.
Known for his signature style of being preoccupied with the concept of flight, Miyazaki reveals an incredibly nuanced relationship with birds in the film. One thing is for sure: Miyazaki’s not the best at hiding his disdain for birds. From the monstrous parakeets that eye Mahito greedily to the flock of pelicans that feed on bubble-like spirits called Warawara, we see every variety of a bird attacking the film’s ‘hero’ in every possible way. Even for the heron, it does not take much time before it morphs into an ugly, flightless man in a bird’s skin.
However, scene by scene, the film introduces the limits of philosophy that Miyazaki has preached for his entire career. Even the dying pelican, when talking to Mahito about how the tower was a prison — they had tried and failed to escape, which left them with no option but to eat the Warawara to survive.
The film portrayed how real the temptation of the “other side”, or the extraordinary, is. The beauty of the film is how it resolves it. While entering the unknown, Mahito knew that he could not stay there, no matter how perfect it seemed. Even when he saw the chance to be with his real mother, he chose to return and accept his real world.
