2023-10-31 20:30:06
“The Boy and the Heron”, by Hayao Miyazaki. STUDIO GHIBLI
THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – NOT TO BE MISSED
Ten years after The wind picks up (2013), Hayao Miyazaki, 82 years old, leader of Japanese animation, co-founder of the legendary studio Ghibli, returns with a new feature film characteristic of the late works of the great masters: freed from all justification, having nothing to prove only to themselves, getting to the point. After the magnum opus (Spirited away2001), the baroque turn (The Howl’s Moving Castle2004) and the realist incursion by the Second World War (The wind picks up), comes with The Boy and the Heron time for recapitulation and synthesis.
The film thus creates a junction between the wartime story, since it opens in 1944, and the more proven Miyazakian formula of the initiatory tale. The master having, in this matter, borrowed more than once from British children’s literature, none of his films had until then paid such a tribute to the Carrollian legacy ofAlice in Wonderlandas this time it assumes itself as a series of visions, a book of shimmering images on the edge of surrealism.
The story, however, picks things up where The wind picks up had left them, overlapping part of the same autobiographical material (the stricken city, the move to the country, the father passionate about aviation). Tokyo, 1944. Little Mahito, 11 years old, loses his mother in the bombing fire. With his father, who manufactures Type Zero fighter planes (the model for kamikazes), he is evacuated to the countryside, to the large mansion belonging to the maternal branch of the family.
The boy initially has difficulty acclimatizing, especially when he discovers his father remarried to his ex-wife’s younger sister, and that this stepmother is already expecting another child. In these lonely days, he is visited by a strange gray heron who draws his attention to an old tower at the rear of the estate, once erected by a bibliophile great-uncle, now condemned. The building actually contains a portal to an inverted world, a marine universe populated, among other creatures, by ornithological swarms, and where the corridors of space-time branch off. Mahito dives in and makes his way through it, hoping to find his mother.
Handmade drawing
To rediscover Miyazaki is to reconnect with a now familiar trait, a supple roundness which flourished and, above all, a work ethic based on long time and handmade drawing, the almost fetishistic observation of natural movement, which alone allows then to take the springboards towards the imagination. The head start that the master maintains over the pack of world animation becomes evident in the face of these ordinary gestures rendered with the greatest finesse, the line synchronous with the pulsation of life. The young hero hurtling down a flight of stairs four at a time, the foot of a woman treading the ground as she descends from a convertible, the flight or landing of a wader, down to the slightest quiver of a wing , an old woman puffing on a cigarette arouses at least as much wonder as the fantastic wonders to come, crossed ultimately by the same vital energy.
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