Review of The Boy and the Heron /君たちはどう生きるか, directed by Hayao Miyazaki

I was actually blessed with the opportunity to see The Boy and the Heron twice. I work as a film critic over at MovieWeb as another one of my main jobs (you can find a lot of my criticism there—this blog tends to just be reviewing.

I see a distinct difference between the two), and in 2023 I had the opportunity to go to the New York Film Festival for the second year in a row. One of the movies I’d been dying to watch at the film festival was The Boy and the Heron, and I did our review for it as a press member before it was released to the public.

But of course when the English dub came to theaters near me, I had to take my sister to see it. She’s one of those people who’s kind of allergic to subtitles (or so they say), so it’s hard to get her to see any movies not in English.

We booked our tickets at AMC, as we have subscriptions, and on a Sunday night we sat back in the chairs and I got to see this wonderful movie for the second time.

Let’s get into the review!

While grieving his mother, young Mahito gets sucked into another world and adventure.

Our main character in this movie is Mahito, who, at the very beginning of the movie, wakes up one night when everything is in flames.

This film is set in Japan during World War II, and is based on Miyazaki’s experiences leaving his town after it was fire bombed by the Americans in the middle of the war. Mahito realizes the hospital his mother works at is specifically burning down, and he runs through the streets in search of her.

Unfortunately, she passes away, and Mahito and his father, a factory owner who manufacturers cockpits for war planes, move to the countryside of Japan until the war is over.

There, his father marries his mother’s sister, and Mahito struggles with the impacts of her death. His new mother, Natsuko, is pregnant with his potential sibling, and when they arrive at the family estate, they are greeted with a grey heron.

Mahito meets the group of elderly women who help run the house, but throughout his days there, the grey heron proves to be a strange one. It speaks, telling Mahito that his presence has been expected, and hounds him.

Mahito’s father enrolls him in school, but the other kids don’t like Mahito. He bashes his head in with a rock after getting beat up by then, and then is stuck on bed rest for a few days. But when he spots Natsuko heading into the woods, she later goes missing.

With one of the older women, Kirin, Mahiko ventures into the abandoned tower he was told to avoid, and the grey heron is defeated, revealing himself to be a man disguised as a heron. After the keeper of the tower instructs the heron to be Mahito’s guide, they sink through the floor.

Mahito ends up alone in a world covered by oceans. After being saved by a young woman, who we learn is the younger Kirin, they catch a fish to feed the Warawara, which are unborn babies.

Mahito and Kirin watch as Lady Hime saves the Warawara rising to the surface from starving pelicans, and one dying pelican tells Mahito that they were placed in this world intentionally with no feed, forcing them to eat the Warawara to survive (this is such a poetic metaphor to me about life and the world outside). Kirin then instructs Mahito and the heron, who finds him later, where to go to find Natsuko.

From there, they escape the man-eating parakeets and come across Lady Hime. She brings Mahito into the tower, which is the same one as the real world, but when they find Natsuko, she has an outburst and tells Mahito she hates him.

The tower’s energy knocks them all out, and Mahito is saved from being eaten by the Heron. Lady Hime is kidnapped by the Parakeet King, who uses her as a bargaining chip for his people.

But when Mahito ventures all the way up the tower to see what happened, the tower keeper, who is Granduncle, tells him time is up. There is no stability he can create any more, but he found the blocks without malice, and Mahito can stack them to create a more stable world.

The Parakeet King swoops in angrily at this point and builds a really crappy tower, forcing everything to fall apart. They all flee back to their respective times, where we learn Kirin and Lady Hime, who is Mahito’s mother, were from the past—earlier in the movie the older women mention there was a time she vanished for a year. This is where she vanished to.

Mahito and Natsuko get out safely as well, with the heron and parakeets following after.

The heron tells Mahito that he won’t remember any of this, and he does forget. Not long after, the war ends, and Mahito, Natsuko, his father, and his new sibling move back to the city.

Overall Thoughts

This is basically the condensed summary of the movie, but this is such a loaded movie full of wisdom. It needs several watches to be able to understand the extent of what’s going on, as Miyazaki is dumping a ton of thoughts into what comes across as a surrealist film at times.

There’s a rumination about the cycle of the world and the bad going on, which really exemplifies itself with the building blocks and the pelican that despairs about how they were put in the world to starve.

Miyazaki also reflects his own childhood within Mahito, and as he learns to get over his grief and meets his young mother, he is able to let her go, even if he won’t remember it in the future.

Anyways, I cried watching this. It’s full of humor, love, and tenderness. It’s not the greatest Studio Ghibli, but I loved it.

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