Warning: this review contains spoilers! Highly suggest you watch it before reading.
A few weeks ago on a whim, I decided to buy IMAX tickets to see the new Miyazaki movie matinee. The showtime was squeezed in just after an errand I promised to run. Despite seeing so many of his movies when they returned to the theater, this was my first time seeing a new Miyazaki release when it came out on the big screen.
The movie starts with a hospital explosion that kills the main character’s mother before a time skip to him leaving Tokyo for the Japanese countryside. The first five minutes are full of this gorgeous, fluid animation courtesy of Shinya Ohira, who also worked on Howl’s Moving Castle and Spirited Away. Immediately the tone felt different than his other movies: dark and frantic, with the lines blurring between Mahito (our titular Boy) and crowds of people running to and away from the burning hospital. Mahito’s body was distorted to the point where you could barely make out a figure, as his features licked across the screen like flames. When I realized that this was in the context of Japanese wartime, I was taken aback.
The one thing I knew about this movie before going in was that Mahito represented Miyazaki himself with tertiary characters as people who helped him in his career. I knew the relationship between Miyazaki and his mentor who discovered him, the late Isao Takahata, was a massive influence on the story and how the characters related to each other. The opening solidified this instantly for me, conveyed via tone and animation. This was not a story about his ideals necessarily: it was Miyazaki himself.
I am a long-time avid Miyazaki enjoyer. I am not kidding when I say Princess Mononoke has been my favorite movie of all time since I was 12 and saw it on Toonami’s Ghibli Fest autumn of 6th grade. I stole the DVD of it from a friend I have not talked to in middle school (it’s still on my shelf). There’s longevity here, and there is reverence in his works rooted in both awe of skill and nostalgia for me, and that will never change.
What has changed, though, is my knowledge of the Imperial Japanese military during WWII. The older I get, the bigger my feelings become about it. So to see, not even twenty minutes into the movie, Mahito’s aunt gently push him out of their rickshaw to bow to passing Japanese soldiers: I was gagged. Immediately, my jaw dropped. I was smiling and laughing like a lunatic because the depiction of this military felt so normal, and I hated it. The calm, everyday obeisance toward soldiers from one of the most horrifying military exploits East and South East Asia has ever seen felt like such a sick joke; except of course it wasn’t, because this was his literal life. As outraged as I was, it didn’t surprise me.
When Mahito got to the estate, I realized how gigantic his dad’s house was, how rich they were; how much acreage they owned, how his dad drove a car while everyone else walked, the 8 ancient grannies waiting on him. The house was ornate and massive, spanning the grounds like a labyrinth. The signifiers this alone screamed about the implication of his wealth during a time of such scarcity across the globe (we immediately see the grannies fighting over sugar, corned beef, and tobacco) felt unrecognized amidst the story told of a boy who is grieving about his mom, and this wealth was derived specifically from the profits of the war.
Similar to Miyazaki’s own upbringing, Mahito’s dad owns a factory that creates parts for warplanes: the fictional dad makes the windshields (some of which we see briefly stored at their house), Hayao’s made rudders for the Mitsubishi “Zero”. The other children at his school farm when they leave class, but he gets to walk straight home. This causes a fight that alienates him from the other kids, but we are never made to feel anything except sympathy.
Shortly after, we enter the signature Miyazaki “dream world” so to speak, which was honestly my favorite part of the movie. I thought the visuals were delicious, the score by Joe Hisaishi was excellent, and Mahito seeing his mom again (albeit as a child) was pretty touching. The emotional journey I longed for and somewhat expected to get from the film was present in the second half, which almost made me… mad?
After the movie ended, I sprinted to the bathroom and spent a good 5 minutes just reading his Wikipedia biography that confirmed everything that he’d inserted about himself into the movie. One of his first-ever memories is a bombing, and his mother did get sick throughout his childhood. He even went to the countryside to escape Tokyo when it was deemed too dangerous. So yes, this is semi-biographical. One could argue here that he was merely describing his childhood.
Was my disgust at seeing the character who represented him so hauntingly neutral personal? Also yes. I cannot see the Japanese Imperial army without thinking of my Lola’s house getting burned down when she was four in the Philippines. When she went back to school, they made her count from one to ten, words she still remembers: ichi, nii, san. I feel like I have to remember the horrors the Japanese government refuses to acknowledge: comfort women, Nanjing, Manchuria, Unit 731 (trigger warning if you choose to read the Wikipedia for any of these, but especially the last one). It is my form of filial piety.
Is there a responsibility for Hayao to condemn Japanese war crimes when making a movie that merely describes his past? That is the question I am stuck with, chewing on the answer. I want to say there is. For someone with such an anti-war stance, the blaisé-ness of Asia’s Nazi equivalent showing up as a background feature feels both jarring and accurate of the way Japan has rebranded since WWII.
But then again, maybe he doesn’t owe that to the audience. Maybe it’s just him, and always has been. I knew the name Ghibli came from a war plane, and I knew Miyazaki’s initial interest with animation came from drawing the planes so essential to his childhood, the ones that terrorized the Pacific. Perhaps it is me that needs to acknowledge that this person who makes art I’ve admired since I was small wouldn’t be in his career at all had he not been influenced by machines that terrorized my mother’s family when they were small.
Japan’s relationship to nationalism and conveniently forgetting about the war have been on my mind for a while now. As someone who watches anime and reads manga, I continue to think of the soft culture power Japan’s cultural exports hold on the modern-day American economy. It’s no coincidence that animation and mascots became so huge, because the kawaii-ification of what Japan is today continues to dim the tragedies they afflicted during the war, ones that made Nazis wretch in disgust. It’s a stark rebranding.
The Japanese title for the movie is not Boy and the Heron, but rather, How Do You Live? I think that is a more fitting title: how do we live, how do we reflect on what got us to where we are? For Miyazaki, WWII is just that: a means to an end in his story (hence the opening with the hospital bombing), but ultimately responsible for his work. It’s a background character he can choose to acknowledge and have it mean nothing to the plot, while I and so many others refuse to forget.