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The Boy and the Heron
The neighborhood wakes to the shriek of air raid sirens. The anime The Boy and the Heron begins in World War II, a Tokyo suburb during a night raid by U.S. bombers. The boy protagonist, Mahito, sees flickering fireflies of burning paper descending like scattered ashes and when he looks to the horizon, the city of Tokyo is engulfed in fire. He runs into the blaze to save his mother, who is in the city, but his desperate effort cannot outrun the fiery holocaust. His mother dies during the air raid—or does she?
It's only one of the questions raised in the intriguing new film by renowned Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. As cofounder of Studio Ghibli, Japan’s leading animation house, Miyazaki directed films such as Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) and The Wind Rises (2013). He had announced his retirement but returned to direct The Boy and the Heron. Miyazaki was born in 1941 and perhaps smuggles a bit of autobiography into this fantastic tale. He was only four years old when the war ended but the sight of entire cities reduced to ash might have left indelible impressions.
After the air raid, Mahito moves with his father to a remote village in the verdant countryside. Dad is a compassionate but tough and powerful man, an industrialist profiting from the war even as the fortunes of war have turned against the empire. In the village where they now live, old men are conscripted, and schoolboys work in the fields as “agricultural volunteers.” Mahito is staying with his mother’s younger sister, Natsuko, in a feudal compound attended by a clutch of chattering grannies. Mahito has reason to suspect an affair between his father and Natsuko. He also grows suspicious of the grey heron who takes inordinate interest in him.
The heron seems to live in a mysterious tower, visible above the treetops. Mahito is drawn to that place, said to have been built by an ancestor who lost his sanity from “reading too many books.” But some have ascribed even stranger origins for the tower.
The story that follows is a creatively visualized cosmos where solid turns liquid, identity is fluid, inanimate becomes animate, the dead are alive and a building such as the tower can house another world. The multiverse is imagined as a place of many doors, each leading to an alternate universe. The Shinto spirituality that suffuses The Boy and the Heron insists that every tree, bird or ocean might have a hidden essence. Mahito must navigate through the doors of this multiverse, often with the aid of uncertain or unfaithful guides.
