Imagine a tower not too far away from your home, the endless hours wondering what purpose it served. There was always some building in our childhood that enchanted us like that. For me, it was the iron, alien spire that would later be renamed to “telephone tower”. But what purpose did it actually serve? Was it a call center for aliens? Could the tower have been a portal to a completely unchartered world? Sometimes we need to escape from the real world, so just for a moment, be a twelve-year-old and let your mind wander.
The Boy and The Heron is the twelfth Studio Ghibli film Hayao Miyazaki has directed and after seeing the film, I beg him never to stop. Miyazaki is as strong as ever, delivering heartfelt stories about family and life against fantastical backdrops that bring us back to our own childhood fantasies. I believe this film to be a much more coherent and family-based take on Spirited Away. While Spirited puts major emphasis on world building, The Boy and The Heron attempts, and succeeds, at balancing world building and character relationships, keeping us focused on the main character’s family trauma while introducing us to new locations and characters without suffering an overload.
After Mahito’s mother is tragically killed in the crossfire of the Pacific War, he and his father move in with his new stepmother, Natsuko, who is also his aunt. When Natsuko falls ill and wanders into the forest, Mahito must venture through a tower on the outskirts of his home to a completely unseen world on a journey to not only save Natsuko, but also find his possibly alive mother. He is accompanied by a torturously annoying Heron who both helps and pesters him, and a mysterious, fire-bearing woman named Lady Himi.
Mahito is played by Luca Padovan, who also played Paco in Netflix’s You. He performs the character very passably, but I felt with some lines of dialogue he needed to deliver a bit more emotion. The Heron is played by Robert Pattinson, which I believe is his best performance yet, even beating his Batman debut. The whole film, I could, for the life of me, never imagine the voice coming out of Pattinson. He nails every syllable and every joke like a veteran. Christian Bale plays Mahito’s father. Bale uses quite a manly, gruff voice you’d imagine for a father, but the look of his character doesn’t quite match. By far, my favourite cameo, though, was Willem Dafoe as the Noble Pelican, who makes his five minutes onscreen unbelievably tragic.
Of course, The Boy and The Heron hits all the marks of a Miyazaki film: enjoyable animal villains, iconic miniature creatures for Ghibli to merchandise mercilessly and an otherworldly conclusion that ends so unapologetically abrupt, you just plead to stay in the film world for five more minutes. I like to imagine this as a sort of spiritual successor to Spirited Away in that the two each allow breathing room, there’s no sense of urgency, like in Princess Mononoke. We as the audience are free to explore the world and experience what this new realm has to offer.
Mason’s Rating: 5 Stars! Essential Viewing!
Mason Horsley is a graduate of UOW with a Bachelor’s degree in Creative Arts, majoring in Creative Writing and minoring in Theatre. He hopes to write and direct a feature film and has been working on screenplays since he was 17. He writes film reviews for the Tertangala and works on his latest project ‘The Last Film’ while working a full-time job at a fish market. Mason despises reviewing films he dislikes and because of this, every review he writes acts as a recommendation.
Image Credit: GKids Films