This review is part of our coverage of the 2023 New York Film Festival.
The Pitch: An air raid siren blares; smoke fills the night sky. It’s World War II-era Japan, and a bombing of a hospital in Tokyo has left young Mahito (Soma Santoki) without a mother. A year later, he moves to a rural village with his stern father (Takuya Kimura), who manages a factory building planes for the war effort. Mahito’s grief still burns bright, stoked by his father’s marriage to his mother’s younger sister, Natsuko, and the impending arrival of a new sibling. He’s lonely, out of place among all the trees and the bevy of old ladies who flock around the village.
Mahito is also harassed by a blue-grey heron, whose croaks and groans slowly start to take the form of human speech. Before long, his life takes a turn for the supernatural, as a quest to find his missing stepmother leads him (and the bothersome heron) into a fantastical realm hidden inside a tower erected by his mysterious great-great-uncle…. where the heron claims Mahito’s long-lost mother still lives.
The Wind Rises… Again: It’s been a decade since animation auteur Hayao Miyazaki directed a film (his last was 2013’s The Wind Rises, another comparatively muted drama set amid the violence of WWII). While his studio, Studio Ghibli, has dutifully produced many films since his last, they never quite captured the ineffable magic that seems to surround his works. And so, the master returns to his field, building another fantastical expanse of hand-drawn animation and deeply felt characters that hum at the frequency of a fairytale.
The Miyazaki faithful will recognize many of the rhythms of his works in The Boy and the Heron: Like Spirited Away, a young child searches for their parent(s) in a mesmerizing world that threatens to swallow them whole. The verdant serenity of nature threatened by man’s insatiable greed, our aching need for connection — it’s all here in Mahito’s relatable journey. He’s a boy lashing out at the world for taking his mother away from him, all while running from the myriad pressures he faces.
It’s a classic coming-of-age story, colored with all of Miyazaki’s gentle strokes of the pen and highly detailed sense of architecture (the film ushers us from the thatched-roof cottages of the Japanese countryside to sparse no-places that evoke the paintings of De Chirico).
Stairway to Heron: Unlike many of the master’s most popular works, like Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, The Boy and the Heron takes its time to fully immerse its character in the dreamlike reality and stylized creatures of its fantastical world. Its first half plays out more like something from Ozu, a slice-of-life tale where a boy grieves, pushes people away, and hurts himself just to feel something. Joe Hisaishi delivers another beautiful, plaintive score filled with lonely pianos that give way to sweeping strings.