The Boy and the Heron

Let me just get the preamble out of the way: I'm not a Ghibli superfan. I like a lot of their movies, but I don't think Miyazaki is infallible. I also had literally no idea what to expect from this movie going into it, not even the setting. All I knew was the title and what the main character looked like, so it's not that the movie didn't live up to my expectations or anything like that.

Let me also say that me being negative in this review doesn't mean I completely hate it. It has a lot going for it. The animation is absolutely stellar, as is always the case with Ghibli. The music is phenomenal and fits the film perfectly. The opening scene is an 11/10 masterpiece that had me thinking I was about to watch the greatest movie of all time. Even the movie's first act had me intrigued by what was coming next, although I do think it dragged on too long.

If I'm being honest with myself, the idea behind this movie was amazing. There's enough drama inherent in the setup of Mahito losing his mother in a fire; add onto that that his father then married his aunt, his mother's younger sister, and you've got some serious intrigue. And this is what the first half of The Boy and the Heron does: builds up this tension between Mahito--the quiet, curious, sneaky boy protagonist who is polite to a fault, gets into fights, and who is hiding a deep, unimaginable grief over his mother's death--and Natsuko--his aunt who is now his mother and who is pregnant with his younger sibling.

Being a Ghibli movie, though, the fantastic and the supernatural are to be expected. And so it's not necessarily surprising when the titular heron begins to talk to Mahito and call him to the mysterious, off-limits tower. It's not really surprising when he is pulled into another world and meets a younger version of his mother and his great-granduncle, who was said to have disappeared decades ago. And it's not even surprising when this movie takes a shit on itself and transitions to a save-the-dimensional-balance plotline because every serious movie nowadays seems to love jacking themselves off with magical quantum physics.

People will say that I and others who didn't like this film 'didn't really understand it,' and while I'm not claiming I've figured out the plot, it doesn't take a genius to get what Miyazaki was going for. It's a story about grief, love, and life, and dealing with all of these things in reality. How do we make a world free of malice when that world is controlled by Imperial Fascists hell-bent on taking it over? How do we move forward after we lose somebody? How do we let go of our own fears and reservations to do so? The themes and ideas that the movie is trying to convey are all there, and honestly, I think they are really interesting. The problem is that the execution is absolute dog water.

Even though I said I liked the first half of the film (and I did), it has its problems. One that bothered me in particular is that nothing is explained. Why does Mahito hit himself in the head with a rock? Why does Natsuko go to the tower? Why is the heron not actually a heron? (This, by the way, is to say nothing of the fever-dream, whiplash inducing second half where things just happen like a slideshow with the characters acting more like staples holding the pages of the script together than the people the story is about). Some people will say you can infer the answers to most of the questions, some people will say it doesn't matter. Personally, there wasn't enough there to get me engaged.

But I am almost positive that the details like that wouldn't have mattered had the movie not suffered from its biggest problem, and that is a complete lack of emotion and feeling. Other than the first few scenes that show Mahito and his reaction to his mother's death, this film is completely empty. Character development is on a speedrun: Mahito goes from not liking Natsuko to wanting to save her to treating her as his mother to being at peace with everything without a single line of acknowledgement that his feelings are changing. This dude has the personality of a 2x4, and maybe that would be okay if I could understand why he acted in the ways that he did, but I can't. His feelings are never given the spotlight, and whatever moments of revelation he has regarding Natsuko and his mother are either offscreened or glossed over. The same goes for Natsuko and Himi (and even Kiriko and the Heron). These people aren't characters. They're hollow caricatures who are going through the motions of a heavy and resonant story without the weight to make their feelings real to the audience (or at the very least, to me).

Case in point: Mahito and Himi spend 10 minutes together before they are kidnapped by the parakeets. They are then reunited near the end of the film and they cry as they hug. "I thought I lost you," says Himi. Christ almighty, what the fuck are we doing here? In what world do these two have this kind of relationship? Is it because they are mother and son, and the tower somehow connects those feelings through time and space? SAY THAT THEN!! But I have a sneaking suspicion that that's not the case and the folks at Ghibli thought "yep, this is good." I say this because the same thing happens in Princess Mononoke, where Ashitaka and San fall in love despite having spent five minutes with each other and doing nothing but getting their asses kicked by Irontown.

This fixation on going through the motions of a story whether or not the characters are developed enough for it to make sense drives me up the fucking wall. If the audience (once again, me in this case) can't empathize with or at the very least understand what the characters on screen are feeling, why should we care about them? Never mind that plot details aren't explained, or that the ending is atrocious, or that the world building makes no sense; the real issue I have with The Boy and the Heron is that it glosses over the journey in favour of the end goal. "But cosmicturtle0, how can you say that when the movie is LITERALLY about a journey!?" Because I only saw Mahito and friends moving through the world; nowhere did I feel them moving closer to an emotional resolution, until it was giftwrapped and shoved out the door at the end.

I am 99% sure there is a good movie here. It just isn't the one that I saw.