Something to watch tonight: Thursday 11 December

The Boy and the Heron (Miyazaki, 2023)

I don’t often recycle recom­mend­a­tions from the Substack which is strange because there are well over 500 news­let­ters to choose from.

Two years ago today I’d just seen Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron for the second time. What a marvel!

Here’s what I wrote back in December 2023:

After I came out of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron yes­ter­day I texted this mes­sage to the fam­ily chat:

“Don’t read or listen to any­thing about Boy and the Heron before watch­ing. Not even from me.”

This is excel­lent advice when it comes to get­ting the most out of the film but it presents some­thing of a chal­lenge for this news­let­ter. I’m going to make a list of obser­va­tions that I hope are help­ful but that do noth­ing to spoil reveal any of the sur­prises that are in the film. There are many.

• This is the fourth excel­lent film released recently by a dir­ect­or who is in their 80s but this the only one of the four that seems to be per­son­ally informed by age and age­ing. A dream­like remem­brance of things past, if you like.

• The film is set dur­ing World War II and – even dur­ing the fantasy sequences – all the char­ac­ters are hungry.

• The open­ing sequence feels like a nod to Grave of the Fireflies, a Ghibli film made by Miyazaki’s col­league Isao Takahata, released on the same day as My Neighbour Totoro in April 1988.

• It’s clearly a film that could have been con­ceived and made by no oth­er dir­ect­or than Miyazaki.

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• Visually, it feels inspired by Miyazaki’s love of Europe and European archi­tec­ture and the European tales that he has adap­ted in the past: The Borrowers (which became Arietty), Tales From Earthsea (actu­ally dir­ec­ted by Miyazaki’s son Goro), Howl’s Moving Castle.

• It com­bines the weird, often night­mar­ish, qual­it­ies of Spirited Away with the real­ist­ic con­text of The Wind Rises.

• In fact, it does a won­der­ful job of show­ing how fine a line there is between dreams and nightmares.

• While there is a lot of visu­al inven­tion – and cute­ness – I don’t think this is a film that chil­dren will get much out of.

• From memory, there are no Ghibli cats. Lots of dif­fer­ent kinds of bird, but no cats.

• The final scene – the final shot – is as dev­ast­at­ing a per­son­al state­ment as Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. It stunned me and – even though I gen­er­ally stay through the cred­its – I couldn’t move for sev­er­al minutes afterwards.

I’m going back to see it again on Sunday, that’s how much I loved this film.

Incidentally, Netflix also has a doc­u­ment­ary about the seven-year pro­duc­tion called Miyazaki and the Heron which I haven’t seen but will pri­or­it­ise once this Cameron/Avatar crazi­ness is all over.

Also reviewed in that new releases news­let­ter on 8 December 2023: Taika Waititi’s fail­ure Next Goal Wins and Renaissance: A Film by Beyoncé.

Where to watch The Boy and the Heron

Aotearoa, Australia, Canada, Ireland, UK and India: Streaming on Netflix

USA: Streaming on HBO Max