The Boy and The Heron finally released last year after beginning production all the way back in 2016. The 12th film in Hayao Miyazaki’s legendary career has broken numerous records for himself and Studio Ghibli including highest grossing opening weekend for any Studio Ghibli film in Japan and highest grossing opening weekend for an original anime film in America. So despite multiple setbacks, including Miyazaki only being able to direct a minute of animation per month during production, and no real advertising campaign, how is the movie? Here’s my review (with spoilers) of The Boy and The Heron.
The Boy and The Heron follows Mahito Maki (played by Luca Padovan), a young Japanese boy living with his family in Tokyo during World War 2. After an air raid leads to the death of his mother, Mahito’s father (played by Christian Bale) decides to move the family to the countryside for safety. Two years have passed by now and Mahito’s father has married a woman named Natsuko (played by Gemma Chan) who mysteriously looks just like Mahito’s dead mother. She’s pregnant as well. Bored, alone, and not able to get along with the kids at school, Mahito spends his free time wandering around the large property he and his family now reside on. While wandering he encounters two things that will help launch him into his adventure; the grey heron and the mysterious tower that was built and then abandoned on the property decades ago. After the grey heron tells Mahito that his mother is waiting for him and Natsuko goes missing, Mahito must go on a journey to discover the secrets of this mysterious tower.
To start with the positive, this movie does a great job of recreating the vibe that has become so synonymous with Studio Ghibli films. This is most prevalent in the second half of the movie, once Mahito steps into the fantasy world hidden by the tower. Swelling, and emotional orchestral music, beautifully drawn landscapes, and whimsical fantasy creatures are all features of the Ghibli formula that has worked for decades and continues to work in this film. The animation is also top-notch which is another expected element of a Studio Ghibli film. The Boy and the Heron has bits of animation however that are so unlike anything I’ve seen in previous Ghibli films. Any scenes detailing Mahito’s memory of his mother’s death are animated so loose and abstractly; like a million different sights and senses mashing into each other. It’s a perfectly animated representation of a hazy and traumatic moment in Mahito’s life. While the music and animation are objectively good, they can’t distract you enough from the movie’s poor pacing and how disjointed the first half of the movie feels from the second half.
The Boy and the Heron’s first half is not what you’d expect from a Studio Ghibli movie. It’s very slow and atmospheric; it honestly feels like it’s setting up some sinister mystery. Once Mahito is settled in, strange things begin happening on the property. Mahito is attacked and told by the grey heron that his mother is waiting for him in the tower, but he can’t ascertain whether what he’s seeing is real or imaginary. It also seems like Natsuko and the group of elderly women who attend to the grounds know more than they let on. Things get even stranger when one day, Natsuko disappears into the forest and doesn’t return. The slower pace mixed with the uneasy atmosphere made me think that I was going to get a completely different movie than what I ended up getting in the second half.
The second half of the movie, when Mahito enters the fantasy world hidden within the tower, is exactly what you’d expect from a Ghibli movie but less exciting and with no real depth. So, when the movie spends about an hour developing this interesting mystery then turns around and becomes your bare-bones basic adventure story, the disconnect is noticeable. The information that we are given, that is meant to add depth to the fantasy world, is utterly confusing. Here, let me try and explain it to you. This unknown world, hidden in the depths of the old tower, is powered by a magical asteroid that crashed there decades ago. One of Mahito’s great descendants found the asteroid and used its power to create this new world that Mahito now inhabits. To make things weirder, this world also sits outside of the normal flow of time allowing Mahito to meet his mother but as a child. This is later explained by one of the elderly women who tells the tale of Mahito’s mother getting lost in the forest and not returning for a year. During that time, she was in the fantasy world but she’s also still in the fantasy world and still a child by the time her son gets there somehow. Oh yeah, and Natsuko and Mahito’s mother are sisters. You see what I mean? Confusing and convoluted for no real reason.
The voice performances are also hit or miss. While the English cast is filled with some of Hollywood’s finest, their level of performance varies. Robert Pattinson as the grey heron is amazing. It’s impossible to tell he’s the character’s voice actor. He also surprisingly nails both versions of the grey heron, its menacing and mysterious side and its goofy, comic relief side. Florence Pugh is great as both old and young versions of Kiriko. Karen Fukuhara as Lady Himi and Gemma Chan as Natsuko give solid performances as well. Mark Hamill’s performance as the great-granduncle is kind of just Mark Hamill playing a really old guy. Willem Dafoe plays an insanely insignificant character whose sole purpose is to dole out exposition and then he promptly dies. Dave Bautista and Christian Bale must have just turned up and recorded their lines because they just sound like the actors. Bale didn’t even bother turning off his accent which feels really weird when everyone else speaks clearly while he speaks in his, at times, undecipherable Wales accent.
The Boy and the Heron isn’t bad but it’s not very good either. It’s confusing and disjointed. The slower pace of the first half of the movie does not match the second half at all and it has one of the least satisfying endings out of all the Studio Ghibli movies. While there’s some enjoyment to be had for the fans of the studio and animation lovers in general, most movie-goers can skip this movie entirely.
