The Boy and the Heron
February 15, 2024
The following essay includes details from the entirety of the film.
Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, The Boy and the Heron, ends on a happy note, with the main character, Mahito, reunited with his father and adoptive mother after overcoming the struggles he faced in an alternate dimension created by his insane ancestor. The optimistic message one emerges with at the end of the film can be summarized as: There is no escape from suffering.
In the first scene of the film, Mahito’s mother dies in a fire during the bombing of Tokyo in World War II. This is the entirety of our knowledge of Mahito’s childhood. This is all we need to know. The loss of his mother is Mahito’s introduction to suffering; the rest of the story follows Mahito’s growing understanding of this suffering.
Mahito is an enigmatic main character. He doesn’t talk much, and his facial expressions communicate little about his true feelings. He is stoic, and unlike much childish stoicism, his is not a facade. We understand Mahito entirely through what he does and what he tries to do. Thus, the movie encourages the viewer to pay close attention. Much of the film’s runtime feels bewildering, and it’s only much later that earlier aspects start to make any sense at all. In fact, it wasn’t until two mornings after my viewing that I began to suspect the purpose of the movie’s entire middle section.
We see here Miyazaki’s incredible understanding of visual storytelling. I’ve written previously about the way he uses sparse, conversational dialogue to communicate important aspects of a movie’s characters and their relationships. This movie is the culmination of that expertise. The imagery, whether familiar or fantastical, sticks in your mind. These memorable moments float around in your head as you ponder the movie, forming connections and bridges that gradually emerge as a conceptual structure of the film’s narrative. The plot of the story is actually quite simple, but the method of delivery allows it to sink in on a deeper-than-conscious level.
The story of the movie, in a chronological sense, goes like this: Mahito’s granduncle built a tower around an asteroid that crashed into his family’s estate, in which he isolated himself from the world. After going insane from “reading too many books,” this granduncle becomes some sort of wizard, and sets out to create a utopia within an alternate realm that exists within the tower. The granduncle’s goal is to create a world without suffering.
At some point in her childhood, Mahito's mother gets lost in this realm along with her nanny, Kiriko.
Years after losing his mother, Mahito, now a middle-school student, leaves Tokyo with his father. His father marries his wife’s sister, Natsuko, and takes Mahito to live on their familial estate, where the granduncle's tower is located. Mahito’s granduncle then attempts to tempt Mahito into entering the tower, with the intention of convincing Mahito to take over control of the realm as his successor. To do so, he enlists the help of a strange, comical heron-man.
The struggle between Mahito and the Heron, his tempter, is an interesting one. The heron assumes Mahito’s grief for his mother to be his weakness, and promises Mahito that she is still alive and that he can meet her in the tower-realm. But the dismal failure of this tactic provides us with an immediate understanding of Mahito’s character: Mahito, although a child, is not naive. He has learned something about the world through his experiences.
Mahito seems to be trying to live without feeling. When he first meets his adoptive mother, he rejects her attempts to establish a familial relationship. On his first day of school, after not getting on with his classmates, he intentionally injures himself with a rock in order to stay home. The myriad grannies that live on the estate try to show him affection, but he does not reciprocate. He has come to the understanding that human relationships necessarily bring about suffering, and by rejecting them, he is trying to be free from such suffering.
Unwittingly, by doing so, Mahito is inflicting suffering on others. His new mother, Natsuko, is hurt by his rejection. While going through a difficult pregnancy, she consistently calls for Mahito to visit her, which he neglects to do. When he finally does see her, he offers her little comfort, and instead uses the opportunity to steal cigarettes from her room to help with his struggle with the Heron.
Although the two share few words and little screentime, the relationship between Mahito and Natsuko is central to the film. Natsuko’s off-screen suffering is the catalyst for the fantastical adventure that makes up most of the movie. Since we are following Mahito as he deliberately isolates himself from the world, we miss much of her story, and can only piece it together little by little.
In some way or form, Natsuko, like Mahito’s mother before her, is tempted into the tower. We can only assume that her reason has something to do with her unborn child; perhaps she is driven by the desire to deliver the child into a world free from the suffering she has experienced in our world.
Mahito witnesses Natsuko wandering off into the woods on the way to getting lost in the granduncle’s realm, but does nothing about it, so caught up is he in his own story.
The following scene, in which Mahito reads a book left to him by his mother and is brought to tears, is the pivotal moment of the film, although this fact may be lost on most Western viewers. The movie’s English title, The Boy and the Heron, serves to occlude its significance, although we can't really blame the translators for this one.
The Japanese title, Kimitachi wa Dou Ikiru Ka? ("How Do You Live"?) is a reference to a popular pre-War Japanese novel that wasn't translated into English until 2021. To Japanese viewers, the book is immediately recognizable and its meaning obvious, whether they’ve read it or not. Written by Genzaburo Yoshino and published in 1937, the novel was an incredibly popular coming-of-age story written to teach young adults about ethics and responsibility.
The novel’s impact on Mahito is made evident in the very next scene, when he learns of Natsuko’s continued disappearance. Instead of continuing to hide away, Mahito takes responsibility and sets out into the woods to find her. We can see this as Mahito’s first step toward reconciliation with the world. His prior struggle with the Heron was entirely defensive, but in this case, he makes an active choice.
Mahito thus enters the tower as an antagonist. He was not tempted into the tower by the promise of his mother, or by his granduncle’s utopian ideals. We know before the conflict is even set up that he will not become his granduncle’s successor. During the rest of the movie, Mahito does not need to develop or grow up. He’s already done so. He did all his growing up while reading a book in the middle of the film. All that’s left is for us to catch up with his new attitude.
This structure allows for a lot of freedom in the film’s second half. With a main character who doesn’t like to talk and is not particularly conflicted, the emphasis turns to the world he finds himself in. This world is initially inexplicable; nothing we learn about it seems to cohere or make sense, and the different environments Mahito travels through bear little relation to each other. The inhabitants are presented only fleetingly, and their internal world is left unexplored.
This chaos is intentional. It is the essential nature of this realm, and its origin lies in the granduncle’s misguided notion that he can create a world without suffering.
When Mahito first enters the world, he is chased by a hungry flock of pelicans, desperate for food. After escaping, he meets a younger version of Kiriko, his mother’s nanny (introducing the fact that this realm exists outside of time), who explains that she must catch fish in order to feed a population of transparent human-like people who, for whatever reason, are unable to kill. Aside from these transparent people, Kiriko has also taken it upon herself to sustain the Warawara, tiny smiling fluffballs that radiate innocence and joy.
Unfortunately for these fluffballs, they have a predator: the same pelicans that attacked Mahito earlier. The scene in which the pelicans feed on the Warawara is deliberately styled to be gruesome and unnerving, as the utterly defenceless and childlike Warawara are feasted upon by a flock of ruthless pelicans.
Although the attack is deliberately staged in the film to be menacing and unconscionable, it is in fact a depiction of the most common and unnotable type of phenomenon in the world: organisms eating other organisms. In our world, animals eat other living things all the time; in fact, it’s one of the main things we do. It is only made to seem perverse by playing on our sentiments. The Warawara are exceedingly cute, and so we don’t want to see them get eaten. The key aspect here is that we don’t want to see it. We need it to happen, or else our world couldn’t function, but we’d like to ignore it as much as possible.
Later in the night, Mahito comes across a dying pelican, who explains the nature of his existence. Although this realm is primarily made up of a gigantic, sprawling ocean, there are no fish of appropriate size for the pelicans to eat. The pelicans, who were brought into this world for reasons not their own, have only one potential source for food: the Warawara. Thus, they have no choice but to attack when the defenceless Warawara go floating off into the sky.
We can now attempt to reconstruct the process by which the granduncle formed this world. The probable starting point here is the Warawara. They are beings of pure joy and naivete, who could only exist in a world without predators or danger of any kind. They have no sense nor method of self-preservation, and thus their prosperity is immediately made impossible by the introduction of essentially any other being into the world.
Then we have the transparent people. The granduncle wanted a world without suffering: this is why the transparent beings can not kill. However, because they can not kill, they also can not live. Presumably, they can’t die either, which is why they instead devolve into mere shadows.
The general trend here is an ecosystem that is entirely out of balance. The food chain is insufficiently stocked with creatures or plants of appropriate size and ability to eat or be eaten by each other. The pelicans go hungry because there are no fish small enough for them to eat. The food chain is missing links.
This idea is embodied in the parakeets we meet later. The parakeets have taken on human-like size, posture, and social structure, establishing a monarchical polity and living within a large city. The ridiculous incongruity between their cartoon-bird design and their sophisticated lifestyle makes clear the satire at play here. These parakeets are remarkably stupid, avaricious, and gluttonous. Their only purpose seems to be to butcher and eat other creatures, and they follow their duke with a gormless intensity. In other words, they are people, as viewed through a certain lens.
Unlike the pelicans, who were thrown into a world without prey, the parakeets seemed to have been invited into a world without predators. Thus, they are allowed to flourish in a way that they never could have on Earth. This dominance reinforces their innate stupidity, as they are never challenged to improve or develop. They become carnivores more out of boredom than necessity. To be a carnivore is one thing, but to take such satisfaction and pleasure from the destruction of other creatures is another altogether. The parakeets’ thirst and passion for consuming other life makes them ugly. What were once beautiful and colourful tropical animals have become deranged and despicable creatures.
It isn’t difficult to see where Miyazaki is going with this. This is not to say that Miyazaki hates humanity; if he did so, he wouldn’t bother making movies at all. What he is trying to showcase is a particular side of humanity: particularly, the aspects that become prominent when we are disconnected from the natural processes of striving and suffering. This fits in well with Miyazaki’s well-known environmentalist tendencies, and functions as a compelling allegory for the imbalance of modern human existence in general.
Thus, the film is obviously criticizing the utopian project of the granduncle, but I believe this is only secondary. To focus exclusively on the allegory of his realm would be to ignore the character that we came to know in the entire first half. Instead, the granduncle’s bombastic and fantastical failure serves to elucidate the shortcomings of Mahito’s more subdued attempt to avoid suffering.
It is made clear in the granduncle’s realm that life, in the recognizable form of animals, survives by inflicting suffering on other forms of life. This is most obviously the case when it comes to eating. We eat creatures or plants in order to live, and to do so we often have to kill that which we want to eat. As we saw in the example of the pelicans and the Warawara, we can develop a sentimental reaction that sees such actions as “bad” or “ugly,” but this kind of sentiment is hard to rationally justify, and often more than a little hypocritical.1
While we benefit from inflicting suffering on others, there is also a real extent to which we benefit from experiencing suffering ourselves. A being that does not suffer any form of adversity grows imbalanced and perverse, as evidenced on the one hand by the parakeets — and the humans they represent — who are so dominant that they become stupid, and the Warawara on the other, who are utterly incapable of basic survival, being born into a world designed to exclude suffering.
It may seem dreary and depressing to say that suffering is essential to existence, but this is far from a pessimistic attitude. Through suffering ourselves we gain strength, and through recognizing the suffering of others we form connections.
The moment when Mahito reads the book his mother had left for him is the moment he comes to terms with his own pain: when he accepts it instead of fighting it. We see him shed a few tears, which is a significant amount for a boy who rarely shows any emotion at all. These tears, however, are not the childish sobs that we often see from Ghibli protagonists. They are of a mature nature, representing not only sadness and grief but a recognition of the responsibility he must take on. He can not live only for himself, and he can’t keep looking backwards.
Thus, Mahito’s entrance into the false utopia of his granduncle is not a means of escape, as it is for many other children in fantasy stories. Instead, it is the means of his reintegration into the Real World. His stoicism itself is transformed; what began as a fearful impulse to hide from the world becomes a pillar of strength that he can use to help others.
Both Mahito and his granduncle’s attempts to evade suffering end up inflicting suffering on others. Their actions also did little to alleviate their own suffering: Mahito’s recurring nightmares show that he still keenly feels the effects of his mother's death; while the granduncle becomes a dour and dejected wizard.
We are born to suffer! This is, in fact, a good thing. Or rather, it is neither a good nor a bad thing. Miyazaki has the subtlety and breadth of view that allows him to create a film about suffering that feels neither gloomy nor dour. The film's happy ending is not arbritrary or contradictory; it reflects the film's optimistic message. Although not "pleasant", the necessity of suffering is not a pessimistic idea. Suffering is an inherent aspect of existing in the world, but this does not make it the prevailing feature of life. Instead, it is what allows us to grow, to become strong, to live for others, and to create a slightly-more-perfect world out of the one we already have.
1. Choosing to eat certain animals but not others is often a sentimental and not an ethical decision (i.e. not eating certain animals because they are cute or seem intelligent.) There's nothing wrong with sentimental decisions, of course — most of the decisions we make in our lives are sentimental in one way or the other.