Caveat lector: spoilers follow for The Boy and the Heron.
Recently I watched Porco Rosso for the first time. I didn’t expect to find the tale of an Italian sea-plane bounty hunter in the Adriatic Sea cursed to look like a pig by his distaste for humanity in the wake of the Great War as personally moving as I did, but boy did I. Porco’s ace pilot schtick, resistance to fascism, loneliness, and pride were simply more important to me, I think, at 28 than they would have been had I seen this film earlier on.
The thing is, I’m typically more attracted to Miyazaki’s more explicitly fantasy-oriented fare. Princess Mononoke has long been my favorite, followed closely by Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away, and trailed by the likes of Ponyo and The Secret World of Arrietty. These have appealed to me for their persistent themes of the divinity of nature, the folly of war and greed, the importance of meaning making in the midst of suffering and death, feminism, and the pluriform character of authentic love. At his best, Miyazaki does what Ibn Arabi would have called granting corporeality to the conceptual and conceptualisation to the corporeal: that is, he uses the imagination as a medium where the line between the sensible and the intelligible becomes blurry and indistinct. This is arguably the best way to describe his distinctive art style, at once capable of pitiless realism and dreamlike landscapes that bleed into and out of one another like an impressionist painting. It is also the best way to understand his idiosyncratic narrative style, in which he prefers as a rule that there be no permanent antagonists, no genuine villains, no absolute beginning or finality. Miyazaki visibly makes his movies in response to felt emotion and theme, to which plot details and pieces of dialogue are secondary aids rather than the primary point. The canonizing brain of a Western viewer is naturally challenged by this seemingly cavalier attitude, because it ends up meaning that Miyazaki is often unconcerned to answer acute questions about unexplained details in his work, and he is often willing to trust the audience to figure something out without his having to spell it out. If showing is better than telling, Miyazaki knows that intimation is better than both, and it’s often the things we don’t see, and the answers we don’t get, that make a film memorable.
This is all important to keep in mind when approaching a film like The Boy and the Heron. The reviews of the film have been solidly positive across the board, with many people calling it Miyazaki’s swan (or heron, I suppose, as there are no swans in the film) song, and not unreasonably. The film calls back to nearly every one of Miyazaki’s previous entries, whether by visual, dialogue, character, or plot, and where the man began his career at 22 in 1963, the man is now 82. This film took seven years to produce. It’s not inconceivable that this is his last, or his second-to-last, entry in his oeuvre. The movie also has a clear autobiographical bent to it that makes it feel like it could be the last thing Miyazaki has to say, even though reports suggest that he’s already working on his next one. The Boy and the Heron follows a boy named Mahito, whose mother dies in a hospital fire in Tokyo during World War II. Mahito and his father, Shoichi, leave Tokyo a year later and move to the countryside estate of Mahito’s mother and her living sister, Natsuko, whom Shoichi has married and impregnated. Shoichi is a distant, but not bad father: he runs a factory making airplane pieces for the war effort, just as Miyazaki’s father did. Mahito takes coldly, but not, per se, rudely to his “new mother,” who makes an effort with him but seems both unable to connect as well as to connect him with her own grief for her lost sister.
At the estate, Mahito meets a variety of old women-servants, gets into fights at school, and severely wounds himself in what he later acknowledges as a sign of his own malice towards his circumstances. He also begins to be stalked by a grey heron that talks to him, telling him that his mother has requested his presence in another world. Mahito initially tries and fails to kill the heron in a series of dreamlike sequences, until Natsuko goes missing and Mahito finally confronts it in the estate’s mysterious tower. The tower was built by Mahito’s great-granduncle, an eccentric wizard who constructed it around a fallen meteorite; it was deemed so dangerous that it was sealed off by Mahito’s grandfather, but Mahito’s mother, we learn, once disappeared there for a year before returning. The tower master—Mahito’s great-granduncle himself—commissions the heron (revealed to be a small, gnome-like man inside of a heron suit) to be Mahito’s guide in the other world as he searches for Natsuko and seeks the truth about his mother.
The fantasy world that Mahito enters is best described as a dreamscape. Unlike, say, Narnia or Middle Earth, or fantasy worlds like Westeros or the Continent from The Witcher, where there are realistic landscapes with clearly defined borders that could theoretically be mapped, this is not that kind of world: it visually looks like a mashup of different things the way one gets in a dream, and like a landscape whose definition is more concrete in some places and less in others, where some details simultaneously make perfect sense and are completely inexplicable. When Mahito lands in the other world, for instance, he finds himself on an island shore, and he gazes out at a thick ring of ships encircling the world (cue the stream of planes in eternal flight through the heavens in Porco). We later learn that these ships are phantoms, but that’s not the point: they give the visual impression of the kind of seemingly random image generation of which the mind is capable in dreams, the kind of vague gesture towards realism that some dreams evoke: water - sea - ships, not “ships sailing realistically on the sea” (compare, for example, to Ponyo). How to put this? I’ve seen this world before, I thought as I was watching, in my own dreams, filled with water and islands and nature-reclaimed spaces and houses in improbable places and creatures caught between some degree of realism and exaggeration based on my own fears and…you get the idea. But this is also what makes the fantasy shtick of The Boy and the Heron work: its inherent strangeness is also what makes it familiar, because what Miyazaki has animated here is a dream, the kind of dream many people have but have trouble explaining or remembering afterwards, unless, like Mahito, they manage to bring something back with them.
Mahito is narrowly saved several times in the tower world: by Kiriko, a younger version of the elderly servant he entered with, and by Hime, a young girl with powers of fire who rescues him from the carnivorous intentions of large, mildly anthropomorphic parakeets. (“He really made his feelings on parakeets clear,” my friend observed when we left the theater.) With Hime, they sneak into the tower (which she clarifies exists across many worlds) and she shows Mahito the way to get back home, but Mahito insists that he won’t leave without Natsuko, and is ushered towards her delivery room, where she reveals her hatred for Mahito, only softened by his relenting to be able to call her “mother.” Hime and Mahito are knocked out in the aftermath and captured by the parakeets, who have cannibalistic intentions towards Mahito but plan to bargain with the tower master using Hime.
In a dream sequence, Mahito meets his great grand-uncle, the wizard that controls the tower, who explains to him that the world of the tower is collapsing and he requires a successor of his bloodline, perhaps someone who will be more capable of creating a just world than he has been capable of doing. Granduncle (Mark Hamill) wants that successor to be Mahito. Mahito awakes, is saved from slaughter and butchery by the heron, and the two chase after Hime to rescue her from the parakeet king. In the ensuing sequence, it is revealed that Hime is Mahito’s mother from her youth, during the year that she disappeared from the ordinary world. Mahito is given a last opportunity to succeed Granduncle, which he refuses, choosing instead “a world of chaos” because it is a world where he will find friends. As the world of the tower collapses, Mahito, Hime, Kiriko, Natsuko, and the heron all respectively return to their own times. The various bird peoples flood out of their collapsing world with them, including the heron, who alone retains his sapience. The heron questions Mahito if he remembers what took place in the tower world, which Mahito assures him he does; this surprises the heron, who deduces that Mahito must have taken something with him; Mahito, in fact, has some of the building blocks of the other world in his pocket. The heron concludes that Mahito is likely to forget with time, bids farewell to him as a friend, and a year later, Mahito leaves with his family for Tokyo again, abruptly ending the film.
This is a dense film, with a lot of moving parts, layers, and deep emotional cuts, all of which Miyazaki largely relies on the intuition of the viewer to catch; that’s his genius, and the joy of trying to interpret his work. In a situation like this, where there’s so much going on, the only real thing to do is to isolate a few beats that seem most impactful.
I have no way to prove that this was an influence on Miyazaki, but I could not help as I watched but think of Daniel 7. In Daniel 7, the seer has a vision of an “Ancient of Days,” an elderly, patriarchal deity who is enthroned and surrounded by myriads of angelic attendants in a heavenly throne room, where judgment takes place. The Ancient of Days judges and condemns, in particular, a variety of monsters that have arisen from the sea, representative of the various Near Eastern and Mediterranean empires who had controlled Judea by the second century BCE when Daniel was composed (while it is set during the Babylonian Exile, this is a fictive setting). Then, “one like a son of man” comes to the Ancient of Days riding on clouds and receives an eternal and universal kingdom over the world. “Daniel” is told that he is the heavenly patron and representative of the people of Israel, leading most modern interpreters to conclude that he is probably the Archangel Michael as he occurs in Daniel. He is reused in a variety of ancient Jewish apocalyptic texts, including the Gospels.
The sequence of an elderly, patriarchal deity succeeded by a youthful warrior deity riding on storm clouds is a common religious motif from the Bronze Age Collapse that is especially derived in this form from the Baal Cycle at Ugarit: there, the Ancient of Days is El, the creator and father of the world, and the Son of Man is Baal, the young deity of storms, warfare, and fertility, returning from fighting the Sea and its monsters. In Ancient Israel and Judah, where Yhwh took the place of Baal in their otherwise basically Canaanite religion, Yhwh was the son and successor to El; by the tenth century, the two had fused and Yhwh was now in the position both of patriarchal El and young warlike Baal. By this very late stage, in the Hellenistic period of Early Judaism, Yhwh has functionally receded into the El identity and the Baal identity is delegated to a variety of intermediary divine, angelic, and human figures, many of them messianic. The concept of a human or human-like figure succeeding God in God’s functions also occurs in Ezekiel the Tragedian’s Exagogē, where God strips off his crown, his scepter, and other regalia, gives them to Moses, sets him on his throne, and leaves the stage. More generally, these narratives of succession match the tenor of Ancient Jewish theology’s more transcendent, non-interventionist vision of God, who dwells far away in heaven, or is in some sense even beyond the heavens, and delegates authority to the gods/angels in heaven and to human beings on earth.
Now, there are ways to theologize these narratives of succession in a manner that avoids the literal idea that God grows old and needs someone to take over as God for him, just as Ancient Greek philosophers found ways to allegorize myths of divine succession by parricide that preserved Ouranos and Kronos even while acknowledging the reign of Zeus. (Plotinus, for instance, understands Zeus as World Soul, Kronos as Nous, and Ouranos as the One, and the stories of parricide and usurpation to be crude mythologizations of their cascading emanation.) But I think it worth sitting with the scandal of the mythic cycle for a moment, especially as a tool for thinking with Miyazaki’s heartbreaking piece in The Boy and the Heron, because Miyazaki depends so much on the affective and aesthetic elements of myth to convey any deeper meaning, often even prioritizing the aesthetic over the allegory. It is a feature of many myths, some ancient, some modern, that the powers of the universe eventually grow old and draw near to death, and require rejuvenation or succession to endure; the idea that the new incumbent of the throne is a child, whether a literal child or a child relatively speaking, who will in turn sit for eons before himself requiring succession also has wide parallels. The sorcerer needs an apprentice, lest the magic die with him. And often, this is a dream come true for the successor: Baal sets out wanting to be king; Charlie Bucket dreams of inheriting the Wonka factory; Luke Skywalker wants to become the savior of the Jedi Order. The aspirations behind these kinds of desire to succeed are often noble, but they are not always psychologically balanced, and the consequences of disillusionment frequently follow. Perhaps it’s just because Mark Hamill’s lovely, warm voice spoke to me in the film, but Luke is a good example: setting out in your 20s to save the galaxy, bring permanent peace, and refound an ancient religious order but the right way this time is almost certainly going to lead to massive disappointment because of the consequences of unchecked optimism. So too apocalyptic dreams of a future golden age, as in Daniel or Parables or the preaching of the historical Jesus: perhaps there will be a millennial age of peace at some point in the future, the genuine article of Saturn’s reign, but it is destined like all time to be succeeded by a new time, one that if it carries the bright light of that glory at all will only do so in diminished splendor.
So, keep all that in mind when assessing the dream that Granduncle offers Mahito, to collaborate with the meteorite (and I could not help but think here: we have an Ancient of Days, a Son of Man, and even a stone falling from heaven to bring the Kingdom of God! Dan 2:45) to build his perfect world. It’s a tempting offer; it is in fact the offer that all millennial kinds of thinking, at whatever scale, offers us: the possibility of a world perfectly ordered towards our desires and our sense of justice, a world that is safe and secured for our interests and wishes, a world that lacks death and suffering. This last point is especially important, because the fantasy world of The Boy and the Heron is a world replete with the dead, from the graveyard that Mahito accidentally disturbs upon arriving there to the sailor phantoms he and Kiriko run into on the sea to the Warawara spirits who ripen in the tower world before ascending to Mahito’s world to be born, some of whom are feasted upon by pelicans; a dying pelican (Willem Dafoe) clarifies to Mahito that they feast on the spirits not gleefully but because they lack other food in this world, where they are cursed and trapped. The parakeets, who seem to constitute the primary society of the otherworld, are voracious, stupid, brutish, and militaristic (all things Miyazaki traditionally associates with one another). Granduncle’s offer to Mahito is not only to resolve the problems of this world (through a Demiurgic stacking and restacking of blocks) but also to protect himself, indefinitely, from the uncertainties of death and change that have proven so volatile for him recently. This is one of the psychological motivations for nearly all imminent apocalypticism: the need to self-protect in the face of tremendous suffering. I will not call the reflex illegitimate, but I will acknowledge that, unchecked, reacting to the fear of suffering with apocalyptic rhetoric often simply defers suffering to others, sometimes aggressively. Mature, self-aware apocalypticism always becomes some kind of sapiential mysticism and activation of the moral urgency of loving-kindness in this life, the choice to be in the suffering world as a relief rather than to try and redesign the suffering world to exclude suffering.
This is hard stuff. Every child knows that the experience of suffering stands in existential contradiction to the goodness of the world. Every child knows instinctively, even if they cannot articulate it, that death is not just unfortunate but wrong, in some sense, and that the ominous, revelatory character of nature must be heeded even if adults are insensitive to it. Every child also feels the sense that they might be able to do something about it: perhaps they can change the world. When I was a boy, afraid that my father might die any day, I had a dream of inventing a pill that could cure death (and also a hovercraft, but that was just for fun). The instinct was right, but the outward form the product simply of ignorance about the true nature of things. As I became an adult, I tried to hold onto that youthful enthusiasm for permanent change in every way I could: as religious eschatology, as political aspiration, as science fiction. But experience brings a clarifying light to the imperfections of the world and our appropriate response to them. As an adult it is not that I feel that death is any less wrong, any less adversarial or evil, than I did as a child; but now I know why it is wrong, in a way I didn’t before. Death is wrong because we perceive it with calcified eyes, under the fallen guise of its cloaked visage. We do not see it for what it really is in our fear-soaked mortality: the principle of change, by which we are released from the stagnancy of this life and free to assume new forms, higher if we have acquired virtue (above all love), lower if we have not. In fact, death is the purifier that teaches us our mortality in order to make us patient to the deifying power of God.
Again, I can’t say definitively that any of this was in Miyazaki’s mind when he made this film, but I think there are enough hints about the Abrahamic apocalyptic and mystical character of a good deal of the imagery to at least make the argument that this is a good read of the film. Above the door to the tower is fecemi la divina potestate—“the divine power made me,” an inscription on the gates to hell in Dante’s Commedia (I.3). That Mahito and the heron are addressed by an old man who dwells in the upper portion of the Tower, which has depictions of the heavens (and maybe gateways thereto?), that they must descend into the world of the tower through the floor, and that eventually they rejoin Granduncle in a place that the parakeets instantly identify as “paradise,” “heaven,” all strongly imply that the film is meant to be Mahito’s own Divine Comedy. Like Dante, Mahito is troubled by loss and change in life; like Dante, he wanders into the woods, where he meets a guide that takes him on an underworld journey where he meets the dead, even descending to a lowest nadir of the underworld where wind seemingly separates him from the adversary who dwells there (Satan in Dante, Natsuko in The Boy and the Heron); like Dante, there comes a midpoint in the story where Mahito’s guide is exchanged for a young woman, the fiery, luminous object of his desire (Beatrice for Dante, Himi/his mother for Mahito); like Dante, Mahito’s quest culminates in a meeting with a divine figure in the cosmic heights who teaches him the mysteries of cosmic order. Insofar as Dante stands in a long line of apocalyptic visionaries in Ancient Jewish and Christian literature, from Enoch to Abraham to the patriarchs to Moses to David to Elijah to Zephaniah to Jesus to John of Patmos to Peter and Paul to the four who entered Pardes and more, it seems logical that Miyazaki, whether he knows it or not, is engaging precisely these biblical traditions, albeit through the medium of Dante.
And here’s the kicker: Mahito says no. Where Dante does not come back at the end of the Commedia, Enoch becomes Metatron, the Lesser Yhwh, Jesus ascends far beyond all the heavens and his humanity is completely deified, and Abraham ultimately submits to death (in the Testament, anyway), Mahito decides to return to life in the ordinary world. Here, Miyazaki cuts his Abrahamic mythology with a bodhisattvic ideal: like King Nimi of the Nimi Jataka, a former life of the Buddha, Mahito surveys the cosmic reaches and then returns to life on earth, choosing the chaos there explicitly for the sake of the friends he will make that will make life meaningful. In other words, relationship in the ordinary world here takes precedence over the possibility of divine knowledge, power, or station: Mahito forfeits control.
On the one hand, this is at the explicit level a rupture in the logic of the mythic cycle of succession I cited above, at the level of the outer aesthetic. The Son of Man does not refuse the crown offered by the Ancient of Days, normally. But on the other hand, the substance of this action reflects the more mature perspective of later Jews and Christians, once their apocalypticism has blossomed into sapiential mysticism. God is so transcendental as to be non-interventionist for all later Abrahamic monotheisms: even the “act” of creation really becomes God emanating or manifesting the world or worlds as a natural effect of what God is, rather than a Demiurgic artifice or a Deistic mechanism. Time, in this perspective, is indeed the moving image of eternity, as Plato suggested, and in turn eternity is in love with the productions of time, unwilling to impose the will of God on creation forcefully. For Christians, who believe that Jesus has ascended and currently reigns at the right hand of the Father, it must be admitted that any honest survey of the last two millennia suggests that Christ largely continues his Father’s policy. Without dismissing the hope of some future Sabbath for the world entirely, then, Christians are turned away from the hope for an imminent, intrahistorical apocalypticism and towards the cultivation of Wisdom in this life, towards sophianic attunement with God as God is in the world and with the world as the world is in God. This can take the form of renunciation, and of a renunciant’s fascination with the infinite, but ideally, it will manifest in a struck balance between the dual and the nondual, seeing the oneness of all things in their plurality and specificity, seeing the diversity of the world as nothing other than brahman’s lila. Renewed participation in the world after wisdom is better than renunciation for exactly this reason.
I may never see another Miyazaki film in theaters. I am privileged to have seen this entry, even as I also hope that Miyazaki keeps making films until he himself passes beyond the doors that divine power made.
Didn’t even realize this was out in theaters. I will definitely have to check it out. Having just watched Takahata’s Princess Kaguya yesterday, I can’t resist recommending this masterpiece to David’s readers. I hope/assume he agrees.
I happened to go see this film this week while preparing a presentation on the Tower of Destruction (Meditations on the Tarot) which is about the construction of an artificial tower maintained by the forceful will of a magician but which cannot sustain itself and is destroyed, granting the gift of: beginning again anew.