Ten years ago, the author announced “The Wind Rises” as his farewell to the world of cinema (at the time, Hayao Miyazaki was 72 years old and had a series of absolute masterpieces behind him, from “My Neighbor Totoro” to “” Spirited Away “, from “The Red Pig” to “Howl's Moving Castle” to “Ponyo on the Cliff”), and indeed the story of the young man who dreamed of piloting airplanes and ultimately designing them contained many of his characteristic features Personality. from a “desperate” pacifism to oneirism as a key to understanding reality to the hope that the future could change a pessimistic present.
Then, somewhat surprisingly, came “The Boy and the Heron” and the recapitulating ambitions of the previous one were replaced by disillusionment with a less simple and welcoming world in which the young protagonist Mahito, to answer the question posed by the film (The original title “ Kimi-tachi wa do ikiru ka” meaning “And how will you live?” (the title of Genzaburo Yoshino's 1937 novel from which Miyazaki was inspired) will be forced to face pain and fear.
We find out from the first beautiful and tragic scenes: We are in Tokyo during World War II and the hospital where Hisako, Mahito's mother, is burning down. The boy's run is useless as the flames engulf the screen (the first, exceptional example of Miyazaki's animation technique, proudly and tenaciously championing a design that is all the more surprising precisely because it is traditional). For the adolescent, entering life begins with tragedy and loss that may never heal.
It won't be long before Mahito finds out that his father has remarried Stoichi Nakito, the sister of his late mother, whom he closely resembles, and who is expecting a child because all three of them live in the two sisters' parents' house near the factory ( of airplanes it couldn't be otherwise) where his engineer father works, but also borders on a ruined tower built by an old uncle. Where Nakito forbids Mahito from being close and of course Mahito can't help but feel attracted. Also because of a strange heron who apparently wants to communicate with the boy. In fact, he starts talking to him and reveals that he is hiding a strange and funny little man inside.
After a series of scenes that reveal the impulses and anger stirring inside the boy, aggression and self-harm (he even hurts himself with a stone), disobedience and hatred (he also tries to kill the heron) are mixed impale with an arrow). Finally ready to begin a journey into the Forbidden Tower, which will prove more labyrinthine than Howl's Castle and far more visionary than the enchanted witch city of Yubaba. And what in other films took the form of an allegorical transfiguration of reality, filtered through surrealism and Shinto iconography, here takes on harsher, if not downright threatening, values.
Military parrots, aggressive pelicans, frogs that multiply endlessly: nature has lost its wonders and has become something hostile or at least not benevolent, where even the birth of a new life (Nakito's son) triggers a wave of violence that destroys everything (and ) threatens to overwhelm Here too, we admire the wonder with which Miyazaki is able to breathe life into simple strips of paper to create something aggressive.
Of course, towards the end of this initiatory journey, Mahito will have to confront the origin of this turbulence and hostility and find an explanation (or rather a reason for it) in the imbalance of the world, in that it is the fruit of a coincidence that man cannot control ( will this giant Magrittian stone that appears in the sky at a given moment collapse on us?), leaving the viewer the task of contemplating this final message from Miyazaki, where the harmony of reality seems to always be there, too decay and then renew themselves into paintings of surprising beauty.