The latest animated feature film directed by Hayao Miyazaki was released in theaters on November 1, 2023. If you haven’t understood everything, we’ll explain.
The first French spectators have been able to immerse themselves in Hayao Miyazaki’s waking dream since Wednesday. The Boy and the Heron is the latest film by the master of Japanese animation, released in cinemas on November 1, 2023. This is a real event, since it has been ten years (since The Wind Rises in 2013) since the filmmaker had not released a new feature film.
The Boy and the Heron is definitely a unique sensory and cinematic experience in Hayao Miyazaki’s filmography. Warning, spoilers. Spectators were able to discover the initiatory story of Mahito, an 11-year-old boy who has just lost his mother in a fire and leaves the Tokyo where he grew up to live with his father in the countryside. There, he discovers that his father has remarried his aunt and that the couple is expecting a new child. At the same time, he meets a gray heron who will guide him through this new ordeal and teach him to understand the world and unravel the mysteries of life.
The Boy and the Heron is enough to disconcert the viewer, since it is a very dreamlike, silent and sometimes hermetic film. Hayao Miyazaki depicts a fantastic and sometimes elusive story about grief, how everyone must find their place in the world, growing up and accepting changes in their lives, including accepting that their aunt is their new figure. kindergarten.
Hayao Miyazaki explores all these metaphysical and philosophical themes in a melancholy and sometimes abstract way, in order to remind the viewer that he himself must find the meaning he wants to give to his life journey.
The Boy and the Heron is probably Hayao Miyazaki’s most personal film. We can in fact link several elements of the plot to the life of the Japanese filmmaker: Mahito’s father, like that of the director, is director of a company specializing in aeronautics responsible for manufacturing airplane parts during the Second World War .
Just like the hero of the animated film, Hayao Miyazaki was very close to his mother and several female characters in his films are inspired by her. His family also left Tokyo for Utsunomiya in 1944, before fleeing north of Tokyo after the city was bombed the following year. The Boy and the Heron is, in this respect, an autobiographical journey into a part of the director’s life.
The Boy and the Heron is inspired by Genzaburo Yoshino’s novel, How Will You Live?, published in 1937. Like Mahito, Hayao Miyazaki received this work from his mother. A true life lesson, the film and the book explore similar themes: mourning, the importance of finding allies in this chaotic world, the benefits of change and growing up, but also the mysteries of human and earthly nature. .
Thanks to the gray heron, Mahito finds himself immersed in a sort of parallel universe that connects worlds and eras. We will know little about this place, where the dead and the future living (the warawaras) rub shoulders, a meeting place between eras (Mahito finds his mother there as a child, but also the younger servant).
An old man, Mahito’s missing great-uncle, governs this world, like a God or an architect of the universe responsible for maintaining a sort of balance in a chaotic world. But perhaps it is Miyazaki himself who questions himself here about his art and the world around him…
The strength of the film The Boy and the Heron is also to leave it to each viewer to make their own analysis and interpret everything they see in their own way, based on their own sensitivity and experience. And the public was not mistaken, since more than 145,511 French people have already discovered the film in theaters on Wednesday and Thursday, becoming the best start for a Hayao Miyazaki film.
