In the Flesh: The Boy and the Heron

Based on Genzaburo Yoshino’s 1937 novel How Do You Live?, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron wrestles with the titular question of its source material as only Miyazaki can. In a world soaked in grief and death, how do you get up and face each day? How do you countenance bringing new life into the world? How do you eat and dream and play and work knowing that death is coming not just for you, but for everyone you love? It’s hard not to see the film as the 82-year-old Miyazaki’s own reckoning with legacy and mortality. The film’s pivotal image, that of a wizened, magisterial old man (Mark Hamill) stacking magic blocks in a light-flooded void to keep the world of the dead from collapsing in on itself, is painfully evocative of the great animator’s own career. Those who actively covet the old man’s legacy, like the Dave Bautista-voiced Parakeet King, are reckless idiots, and those who could claim it legitimately but fear doing so would be burdened by it beyond endurance. “I gave myself this scar,” says the old man’s grand-nephew, Mahito (Luca Padovan), touching the half-healed gash in the side of his head where earlier in the film he struck himself with a stone in a fit of grief and rage after getting into a fight with classmates. “It shows my malice, and that’s why I can never touch the stones.”

Perhaps, as Miyazaki himself has said in interviews, it’s better to let things fade away. Perhaps a legacy isn’t something to seek after. Perhaps beauty and emotion are the only tributes to loss that really mean anything. In a harrowing early sequence, Mahito races through the streets of a burning Tokyo, the world around him sketchy and wavering in a haze of heat and terror, the people themselves indistinct and distorted. Grief and loss separate us from the world, the film seems to say, and in seeking endlessly to relitigate and tend to that grief we ensure this isolation endures and deepens. Contrast the old man’s fixation on permanence with the rejuvenated Kiriko’s (Florence Pugh) no-nonsense approach to feeding and nurturing the next generation of unborn souls. There is no attempt to enforce order, no grand vision or design, only a task that must be done and a worker doing it. The scenes of Mahito and Kiriko catching and butchering a fish to serve to the spirits is among the most gorgeously textured depictions of labor in the history of animation.

Padovan is serious but vulnerable as the determined young Mahito, and Robert Pattinson really goes for it in the other title role, that of the Crane — actually a strange little spirit inside a magical craneskin suit, sawing through each line in a nasal, constricted hiss. The land of the dead is a heartbreaking collection of images gathered together from Miyazaki’s past films — the swamps of Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke, the gardens and gazebo of Porco Rosso, the cubist futurism of Castle in the Sky, the weary architecture of Spirited Away and Ponyo’s joyous, overflowing bounties of creatures and substances — and quietly, gently refined. There is no self-congratulation in it, merely an acknowledgement of a tremendous amount of work done by many in accordance with a single vision, never perfectly adhering, always seeking to enact. It’s a tower in the same mold as the old man’s, something wondrous and burdensome and dangerous, a defiance of mortality and, inevitably, a capitulation to it. How do you live?, the film asks us. You just do. What other choice is there?