I caught one of the final Aussie screenings of The Boy and the Heron last week, cried buckets, and then dumped this long analysis of what I think it was all about (maybe?) in a community Slack. A friend enjoyed it an asked me to share it publicly, so I guess this braindump is my monthly blog post!
Note: I'm not a Miyazaki scholar, nor a student of Japanese history. This was a braindump immediately after I exited the cinema around 1am. I'm sure there are critical things I've missed or misinterpreted, and would love to hear more educated & nuanced perspectives.
So I admit I didn't really understand what the film was trying to say until maybe the final act. The first half hour felt slow even by Miyazaki standards. So many establishing shots, snippets of action I felt contributed nothing to the story. I was there for whimsy and the movie kept waving whimsy at me from a distance and then snatching it away.
Once we got into the magical realms promised by the trailer, I felt things picked up but were still very disconnected. It followed what seemed like a classic slow-conflict structure where a series of fun encounters didn't add up to anything meaningful. But I also felt like there were a series of cultural or literary allusions that I just wasn't grasping - the nature of the heron, the warawara, etc - and I needed to work harder and do some actual thinking rather than being a passive viewer.
And then we hit the finale, where we meet the Great Uncle up in his disconnected loft, and all these pieces fell into place and I just started crying helplessly in the cinema.
So, as far as I read it:
Miyazaki is the Great Uncle. The "house" that came from the sky with sound and fury is the second world war/the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps?
This devastating event that, in its wake, the Great Uncle was able to build a house around and convert into a sanctuary. He created a tower filled with stories that were all fed by that single destructive event - stories so wonderful that, for generations, people have entered them (the tower) and blissfully vanished.
But now the Great Uncle finds himself trapped inside that same creative construct. He is compelled to create worlds/stories ad infinitum, rearranging a limited series of blocks over and over into new narratives that need to hold together despite incredible outside pressures. If he doesn't manage this feat perfectly, the world will collapse and everything he created throughout his decades will be lost and forgotten.
He is so, so tired. He's wanted to quit over and over. But he's unable to abandon the responsibilities of being the creator. We feed on him and are sustained by his stories.
All he wants to do is find someone to take up the mantle, to understand the building blocks of great stories and worlds in the same way that he has.
And everyone he brings to his sanctuary either rejects his offer or, in an act of ego, jealousy and selfishness, destroys his legacy.
As an example, the parakeets - his creation, who covet his creative powers - literally try to capture, carve up and devour his own children! Maybe the parakeets are the larger creative industry? They all want to replicate the Miyazaki spark without doing any of the work, or understanding any of the metaphor. They take his children, his creations, and chop them up into fast food. And when they realise creativity is hard, actually, they flip the table and burn it all down.
The warawara (the cutest part of The Boy and the Heron, perhaps the equivalent to the soot-monsters in Spirited Away or Mononoke's Kodama), too, are part of this. This metaphor of the thousands of lives waiting to be born, snuffed out by swooping pelicans (either US bombers hitting Japanese cities, or maybe even the Japanese military sending their youth to die helplessly and hopelessly in the Pacific - note that the Boy's father manufactures fighter plane canopies and even shrugs off the massive losses of Japanese soldiers in Saipan because it's good for business) before they have a chance to be exist/mature. It felt to me like the Great Uncle / Miyazaki is doing everything he can to sustain their world/their memory, while watching his remaining lifespan slip away, trapped in this self-destructive cycle of forced creativity.
The Great Uncle just wants to rest and nobody will let him. He wants stories to live on, but the people he's created/inspired just shit on his legacy.
And when I realised that this is likely Miyazaki's final film, his final message to his viewers... I just felt like I'd been hit by a truck.
But then, in the final scenes...
The Great Uncle accepts the collapse of his world. His style, his stories, his legacy, will eventually be forgotten, and that's okay. The Boy leaves the world of whimsy. He's rejected his Great Uncle's tools and the offer of becoming the new storyteller. And he discovers one small piece of the Great Uncle's toolset in his pocket. One small bit of magic that he can now craft into something new, something with his own spark, his own thumbprint.
A small piece of Miyazaki will live on in the next generation of storytellers.
So, yes. This movie left me broken.
But also hopeful.
Highly recommended.