A touching fairy tale about love overcoming death, from a living legend of Japanese animation.
World War II is raging. Twelve-year-old Mahito’s mother has been killed, one of hundreds of victims at that time. The boy tried to save his mother, but could not, and her image remains with him. Mahito’s father quickly remarries. His bride is his deceased wife’s younger sister, and they move to the provinces, away from the war. The boy is not happy in the new place. He finds it hard to get on with his pregnant stepmother, Natsuko, and cannot make friends at school. In addition, he is being followed everywhere by a strange, gray heron. The bird assures him that his mother is alive and can be found nearby, in an abandoned tower that was built many years ago by Mahito’s granduncle. At first, the boy does not believe the bird, but he still goes to the tower. There he finds a new, completely wild world. There, it is not possible to change the events of the past, but a person can make momentary contact with it, and this is what Mahito was dreaming of.
In 2016, it was reported that Hayao Miyazaki was working on his final project. However, it took the Japanese legend seven years, during which time the details were kept secret. Only one thing was known: the anime The Boy and the Heron was inspired by Genzaburō Yoshino’s novel How Do You Live?, which was published in 1937 and tells the story of a boy trying to come to terms with the death of his father. The Boy and the Heron is a gift for old and new fans of Miyazaki. His visual style is easily recognisable, although the world that the animator creates in this new work is completely different to what we saw in Spirited Away, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind or Howl’s Moving Castle, since it is at times dark and unwelcoming. The film is not a set of familiar themes and motifs but their logical continuation and a summing up of a career of more than half a century. Miyazaki dedicated The Boy and the Heron to his grandson, a member of the younger generation who will preserve the heritage of his grandfather and not allow him to be forgotten.
The film will be shown in Japanese with Russian subtitles.
The Boy and the Heron
Director Hayao Miyazaki
Japan, 2023, 124 min. 16+