Hayao Miyazaki offers us a new peak in animated film

Each of his new films is announced as the last, and each time, it is a marvel. The living god of Japanese animation Hayao Miyazaki releases his new masterpiece on Wednesday November 1st, The Boy and the Heron. The director surpasses himself in one of his finest productions. A tale of learning, philosophical and animist, this fifteenth feature film by Miyazaki immerses a young apprentice in a nature to which he is introduced by an unpredictable and impetuous master heron. Gorgeous.

Mahito lost her mother in a fire in Tokyo at the age of 11 and found herself with her father in the countryside, where she had grown up. They live, with his new wife and six servants, in an old mansion in the middle of a vast estate where Mahito comes across a strange gray heron, which harasses him even in his room. What’s more, he speaks! Through contact with it, the child will discover the world around him, nature, the universe, their mysteries and their laws.

If Hayao Miyazaki dazzles us with each film, The Boy and the Heron is beyond comprehension. Carried by an animist thought embodied by this master heron, the story loses all rational coherence to better introduce the young apprentice, and the spectator, to another vision of the world. Woven with images teeming with details of incredible detail, Mahito’s adventures are reminiscent of those ofAlice in Wonderland in their consistent inconsistencies. As usual with Miyazaki, Japanese cultural heritage is intertwined with Western references. The graphics evoke a tapestry and the story, a patchwork. The origin of the film is the novel by Genzaburō Yoshino And you, how will you live? (Edition Philippe Picquier) but the story is based on The Book of Lost Things by John Connolly (The Archipelago). The mixture of East and West is always at work in Miyazaki.

Esotericism

No Japanese temples in this Japanese countryside which could be English. Just like the Gothic mansion with Victorian interiors where Mahito lives. He will escape from this cozy world where six servants are the guardians and his father’s new wife, the queen. The heron will catch it with its slender, pointed beak to reveal the “true” reality, the reality behind things. The world is not what we believe or what we are told. Like this heron which turns out to be the shell of a shaman, thus transformed, to meet the child. The Boy and the Heron is, from this point of view, the most complex film by the master, particularly in its narration which can go from rooster to donkey. “Maybe you didn’t understand the movie. I don’t understand it either“, declared Miyazaki in a press release read at the end of the first private screening reserved for Studio Ghibli employees. Perhaps he wanted to put too many things in it? What is certain is that the dazzling beauty of the images and the abundance of ideas that run through it make you want to watch the film again.

By starting from the loss of the mother to take his young hero to a spiritual revelation, Miyazaki visualizes the metaphor of a passage from childhood to maturity. Initiatory tale, The Boy and the Heron is punctuated by stages and tests, by magical creatures, including nature spirits, who could be cousins ​​of the “Sylvans” of the forest of Princess Mononoke. They enhance, with humor and tenderness, the message of the film. We are once again talking about a “swan song” of the master. Let’s hope this heron doesn’t get his skin. In any case, Hayao Miyazaki passes from one world to another like a shaman, and makes esotericism shimmer with a thousand lights.

The sheet

Gender : Animation
Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Actors (voice VO) : Masaki Suda, Takuya Kimura, Kô Shibasaki
Country : Japan
Duration : 2:04
Exit : November 1, 2023
Distributer : Wild Bunch Cast

Synopsis: After the disappearance of his mother in a fire, Mahito, a young boy of 11, must leave Tokyo to live in the countryside in the village where she grew up. He settles with his father in an old manor located on a huge estate where he meets a gray heron who little by little becomes his guide and helps him through his discoveries and questions to understand the world around him and break through. the mysteries of life.