It was one of the most anticipated moments of the 48th edition of the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF): the international premiere of Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, shown on Thursday evening at the festival’s opening. Without being his best film, The Boy and the Heron is by far his most mysterious.
The cartoon was released to the Japanese public on July 14th. Its director, the now 82-year-old dean of Studios Ghibli, was not in Toronto to attend the party.
Ten years ago, Hayao Miyazaki announced his retirement, but in 2016 he announced that he was working on a new feature film, particularly inspired by Genzaburō Yoshino’s book “And You, How Do You Live?” It took seven years to bring the project to the screen under the title “The Boy and the Heron,” a story with testamentary and autobiographical undertones in a wonderful universe.
As in the original book, the action takes place in Japan in the middle of World War II. The beginning of the film is brutal: we hear the evacuation sirens and see the hero Mahito running through Tokyo in flames to find his mother.
Unfortunately, he doesn’t survive. The young man and his father will settle in the country, where he, like Miyazaki’s father, will also manage an aircraft factory. The boy, for his part, will learn to discover his stepmother and his surroundings.
But Mahito is tormented by a heron who uses all means to lure him into a mysterious tower that has been built on the estate and has been sealed for generations…
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The poster for “The Boy and the Heron,” opening film of the 2023 Toronto International Film Festival.
Photo: Studio Ghibli
Between the wonderful and the symbols
The film uses the ingredients that made the director’s previous works successful: a universe in which wonderful creatures develop in magnificent images. Everything is accompanied by the music of Joe Hisaishi, the same who composed the soundtrack of several films by the founder of Studios Ghibli, from Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind to The Wind Rises.
Unlike his previous works, the meaning of the film here is difficult to grasp. In My Neighbor Totoro we found some of that magic that small children project onto the new rural world that surrounds them, like a refuge. In The Boy and the Heron, it is difficult to understand the characters’ intentions.
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Amid a phantasmagoria in which parrots eat people and a fisherwoman is tasked with feeding small creatures and making them fly away, it is sometimes difficult to see where Miyazaki is coming from, and we quickly become overwhelmed by the abundance of symbolism.
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Animator Hayao Miyazaki (file photo)
Photo: Associated Press / Invision/Chris Pizzello
Despite the sense of loss we feel, it is the images alone that captivate us. The director regularly composes veritable animated tableaux, even richer than in his previous films because, in contrast to these, he compiles a larger number of images per second.
Whether it’s the Japanese landscape, vast libraries, endless seas or palace halls, Miyazaki always stands out as one of the masters of visual poetry.
In “The Boy and the Heron,” the director explores themes that shaped his childhood. He glorifies imaginary worlds and, through the figure of the Master of the Tower, encourages future generations to seize the world and organize it in their image, provided they can find their way out of the initiatory labyrinth built for them by the Old Master.