The Boy and the Heron (2023)

SnarkAI Score: 70/100

tldr:

Miyazaki's latest film is a weird rollercoaster of war orphans, family drama, giant birds, and magical nonsense wrapped in Ghibli's trademark charm. The animation is stunning, but starting to feel dated against newer anime powerhouses (Demon Slayer says hi). The story is packed with odd choices, like a morally questionable dad, creepy herons, and some wildly unhinged plot twists that are both hilarious and head-scratching. The English dub flaunts A-list names, but their performances don't hold a candle to seasoned voice actors. It's bizarrely personal and familiar in that classic Miyazaki way, but it lacks the fresh magic of his best work.

Our Scores are generated by SnarkAI's analysis of our reviewer's writing. The tldr summary is drafted by SnarkAI based on that review. All Images are AI-generated based on the reviewer's descriptions of scenes.

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Miyazaki is never bad, but this film reuses too many of his staples to truly be great.

Directed by Hayao Miyazaki and naturally produced by Studio Ghibli, this was the film Miyazaki came out of retirement (again) to direct before retiring (again) upon its completion.

It starts with common Miyazaki themes: a young boy affected by a war, an incomplete family moving out of a city to a new home in the countryside. In this case, it’s so his father can hook up with his dead wife's sister. Like much of Miyazaki's work, the father is absent from much of the film. But given that he's apparently a scumbag, that's perhaps for the best.

"I'm going to be your new mother from now on. Sound good?" is an unhinged thing to say to your war-orphan nephew. Having him feel the baby move and telling him it's a new sister or brother immediately had me rooting against this woman and the philandering father.

The artwork is, of course, impeccable, but the approach and style are showing their age compared to newer anime like Demon Slayer.

Just after they arrive at his new home, and his father's new factory is pointed out in the distance, we see the grey heron for the first time. It flies inside the home briefly, and we’re told it’s unusual. His new home is expansive, richly appointed, and weirdly similar to the house in one season of Tenchi Muyo! He doesn't live in it, though. He stays in a more regular house nearby.

We're introduced to a gaggle of potato-faced old women who are all about three feet tall. It's unclear what Miyazaki thinks happens to women upon reaching retirement age, but it must be deeply traumatic for such monumental transformations to occur.

The boy has a horrifying dream of his mother burning alive and ascending...somewhere. He is running through the flames. Later, the heron leads him to a tower, which he’s told was built by his grandmother's uncle, who apparently read too many books and lost his mind. Remember, kids, reading is BAD!

He gets into a fight at school, but apparently deciding it wasn't serious enough, he bashes his own head in with a rock until blood flows freely down his face. It's weird. He does such a severe job of it that a doctor needs to visit and do stitches. It's also weird when his father says he will get vengeance against whichever child did this to his flesh and blood. Luckily, things get more normal when the heron arrives and says the boy's name a few times.

The boy heads out with a rattan to confront the heron. It snaps the wooden sword easily with its beak full of human teeth and tells him his mother is not dead. Then there's a chorus of fish and frogs swarming over him, saying, "Join us, join us!" His mother-aunt shoots an arrow at the heron and drives the creatures away.

After some faffing around, a bit of petty larceny, and some time sharpening a knife, he crafts a bow like his aunt's but from bamboo. It's useless because it's bamboo. He's lucky it hasn’t snapped already. He fletches the arrow with a heron feather. He also seems to eat a lot of glue in the process, which explains a few things. The heron feather arrow is magically good.

He stalks through the forest with one of the potato women, who tries to stop him from going into the tower. He is aware the claim that his mother is alive is a lie and admits he’s not that bothered about rescuing his aunt. He just needs confirmation on his mother and is willing to risk the trip. It's pretty hilarious how indifferent he is about his aunt.

There's a creepy man inside the heron. He’s much less threatening once his costume is damaged. He does give off pedophile vibes. The boy then sinks through the floor into a new world, where a pirate saves him from a flock of pelicans at the gates of a graveyard.

The Boy and the Heron

Doctor Who Adipoise

We get a moment typical of a Miyazaki film, a gaggle of tiny, cute creatures! These look exactly like the Adipose from Doctor Who.

The boy is stoic. There's no other word for it. Despite the strangeness and terror he’s facing, he stands firm before it, his voice and demeanor never wavering. It’s a common trope in anime for young men.

There is much akin to Howl's Moving Castle or Spirited Away in his exploration of this new world, but with more outhouses.

We cut back to the 'real' world, where the boy's father stops his factory workers from continuing to search for his pregnant sister-in-law/wife and his son so they don't fall behind schedule. I’m assuming he knows of a third sister he can hook up with.

He meets Himi. She’s made of fire and says Nasuko is her sister. I’m sure the fire is just a coincidence to how the boy's mum burned alive. She info-drops that the tower can straddle all different kinds of worlds. We move on, no further questions. We can be sure she’s a monster because she puts butter in between the bread and jam for him. He opens up to Himi that his mother's dead. She cheerfully says, "Mine too!" No further questions are asked there either.

"Be careful; in here there are limits to what my power can do," Himi tells him in the corridor of doors (a very Midkemia Hall of Worlds reference), which is a terrifying thing to say when you pause and think about it, because it implies there are no limits to her power normally.

They release an army of giant birds into the real world through the door. The father chops at them with a sword, and then they turn into budgies. The father appears to be slowly losing his mind. Couldn't happen to a nicer fellow.

Himi waits until he’s electrocuted to tell him not to touch the stone. She’s a little bit of a bitch, tbh. He finds his aunt, and she tells him to leave and that she hates him.

The boy meets his great-granduncle, the tower master. His uncle is playing with children's blocks piled up as a tower. By this point, the boy is dressed like John McClane in Die Hard. The uncle, who would have been a 19th-century Japanese architect, is wearing a black robe adorned with a necklace of turquoise gems, hair that would put Einstein to shame, and a mustache greater even than Sam Elliott’s. So he either always was an odd fish, or since joining the tower, gave himself a makeover. The uncle puts a heavy burden on the boy and tells him it’s his responsibility to choose which block will be used in his toy tower.

The boy then wakes up chained to a wall in the budgies’ kitchen, only to be rescued by the creepy heron-man. They sneak out of the way comically easily.

After a deep conversation with his granduncle, he returns to his world, turning down the chance to create a world of his own. After King Birdman destroys the building blocks and the granduncle starts to die, he tells the boy to run. The boy doesn't even hesitate. He grabs Himi and sprints off, leaving his granduncle to his (well-deserved) fate. The tower collapses. Turns out Himi is his mother! (shock!) and she has to go through a different door. The boy’s calling his aunt "mother" now for some reason. Seems like a bit of a slap in the face to his actual mother, who’s standing right next to him.

The large birds follow them out the door and turn into small budgies as before. They shit all over the aunt, who giggles, saying, “So cute.” It’s weird. Everyone kind of arrives together, and the film ends.

The film is strange and odd in that very special Ghibli way. You forgive the peculiarities because they come with such charm. It’s not his most groundbreaking work, but somehow, it’s one of his most personal, reflecting his own childhood. In feeling, if not in giant birds filled with men. My opinion of it is colored, I think, by my initial impression of the father and aunt hooking up and having a baby together more or less on the bones of the boy’s mother. It’s hard to root for her being saved.

The voice actors for the English dub are very high profile: Florence Pugh, Dave Bautista, Willem Dafoe, Christian Bale. But a continuing trend of hiring famous actors to do voice work rather than professional voice actors shows.