2024-01-03 15:22:53
When Hayao Miyazaki, the soon-to-be 83-year-old founder of the legendary animation studio Studio Ghibli, tells us what he does for a living, it sounds very simple: “For me it’s about creating a unique fantasy world, populating it with characters that I like, and then create a story from it. That’s what animation means to me.” This is what it says in an interview book published in Japanese in 1996. And it still holds true today, six films later.
One could dismiss the brief definition as superficial and generic. But if you get involved with it and ponder it – as Miyazaki’s films also demand – deeper insights emerge. The world building comes first: mostly an idyllic nature into which industrial modernity is cutting its way like a monster. A cat bus rushes through “My Neighbor Totoro”, and in the new film “The Boy and the Heron” there is a dilapidated tower – transitions into a world of ghosts.
It is at the same time a spiritual world, the psyche of the mostly childlike main characters that has become images and spaces. The magic of this world is not limited to psychological imagery; Fantasy and reality coexist. At times the fantasy takes over so much that the mundane life in which the main character’s journey began seems distant and unreal. Only at the end does it appear again on the horizon, like a sunrise after a night tormented by demons.
Figures typical of Miyazaki’s style
Those: STUDIO GHIBLI 2023
Finally come the “characters I like”. Miyazaki has often emphasized the importance of sympathy and intimacy in his work. His most recent film to date, which was long believed to be his last, “When the Wind Rises” (2013), told the story of an aircraft designer in World War II. At the time, Miyazaki’s father worked in a factory that manufactured parts for fighter jets. The director’s feelings about the material were mixed; On the one hand, he has been fascinated by flying since his childhood, but on the other hand, he was hesitant to dedicate a feature film to a creator of weapons. Then he read that Jirō Horikoshi “just wanted to create something beautiful.” Just like Miyazaki himself, even if parents in America report that “The Boy and the Heron” haunts their offspring in bad dreams at night.
The stories of environmental friend and pacifist Miyazaki are not necessarily for children. They just talk about school leaving exams. And paradoxically, they suggest that if we want to age in a good, healthy way, we must keep the dreams, fears, and desires of childhood within us. This is the only way, say Miyazaki’s films, that we can overcome existential crises and still maintain contact with what makes us core.
The new film is more personal than ever: like the young Miyazaki, little Mahito Maki moves to the countryside during the war. The first, harrowing images, reminiscent of the harrowing Ghibli classic The Last Fireflies, show Mahito’s mother burning to death after a bombing in a Tokyo hospital. The fire flickers in shimmering lines. Contours of people and buildings dissolve. What remains, like flakes of ash, is sadness and horror.
Just a fantasy?
A sudden cut and we enter a world that in other times, under different auspices, could have been a paradise: an old manor house in the middle of a spacious park. Mahito’s father, like Miyazaki’s, is appointed head of the local fighter aircraft parts factory. He married his late wife’s sister; she is pregnant. Mahito gets into a fight at school and cuts himself on the way home. Why? To give the attackers a harsher punishment? To castigate himself because he feels vaguely complicit in his mother’s death? It remains in limbo. In fever dreams and with a head trauma, he experiences an adventure that could be nothing more than a fantasy.
A nasty heron, armed with a loose mouth and sharp teeth, lures him to the magic tower on the edge of the property. From there, gates lead into a Miyazaki world, as we know it from “My Neighbor Totoro” (1988) or “Spirited Away” (2001) – full of bizarre characters and governed by strange laws. The entrance looks like Böcklin’s Island of the Dead. The old women who watch over Mahito’s feverish sleep stand around here as small wooden figures, parakeets march in rows and sharpen their knives. They like to eat little cartoon boys.
Towering over everything is a world builder, a figure like Copernicus, who plays a role in an old Japanese book called “How Do You Want to Live?” It’s lying around in Miyazaki’s film, which originally has the same title. It contains a dedication from the dead mother to her child. The world builder could be Miyazaki himself, who chooses his alter ego Mahito as his successor. Vain. Mahito has better things to do than get lost in confused dreams. He makes peace with his mother and returns to reality. It has come full circle. The great Miyazaki remains loyal to his inner child in his last film.
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