Review of the film “The Boy and the Bird” by Hayao Miyazaki

The Boy and the Bird, Hayao Miyazaki’s first feature film in ten years, has been released. The Japanese animation classic here combines all the traditional themes and motifs of his work, filling them with new meanings, but also repeating previous lessons. Tells Julia Shagelman.

In 2013, when the film “The Wind Rises,” a fictionalized almost biopic of aircraft designer Jiro Horikoshi, but in fact a story about the relationship between the dream of flight and the reality in which the flight ends with bombs being dropped on peaceful cities, premiered at the Venice Film Festival, Hayao Miyazaki announced that this is his last picture. This was not the first such case in his career: he had already retired several times, for example, in 1997, after Princess Mononoke. But here everyone almost believed it – after all, in 2013 Miyazaki was already 72 years old. As they believed in 2017, when information leaked from Studio Ghibli that the sensei was working on a new film – now certainly his last, which he started only to say goodbye to his little grandson.

Sixty animators worked on the film for almost seven years, hand-drawing a minute of animation per month. It was released in Japan this summer, without any advertising campaign, using only the author’s name alone, becoming the most successful release in the history of Studio Ghibli and entering the top ten highest-grossing films of the year.

Like The Wind Rises, The Boy and the Bird is largely autobiographical, but Miyazaki uses the details of his own life only as the starting point of the plot, as the action progresses from realistic to fabulous. The film begins “in the second year of the war,” that is, in 1943, when the mother of 12-year-old Makhito dies in a hospital burning after shelling. A year later, the father takes the boy from the capital to a rural estate, closer to the aircraft factory that he manages (Miyazaki’s own father was also the director of an aircraft parts factory during World War II, the family often moved, and his mother suffered from tuberculosis and was constantly in hospitals, although lived until 1983). Here Mahito meets a whole crowd of grotesque old maids, reminiscent of Yubaba and Zeniba from Spirited Away, and his father’s new wife named Natsuko, who is already expecting a child. The shock of this news is intensified by the fact that this is the younger sister of his late mother, who resembles her like two peas in a pod.

In this quiet area, the war seems to be unheard of, but it is reminded of by those mobilized going to the front, by airplane cabins delivered to his father’s factory, and most importantly by Mahito’s nightmares, in which the Tokyo fires are repeated again and again. At the new school he is bullied, he cannot come to terms with the fact that Natsuko has taken his mother’s place, so he hides from everyone in his bedroom, where an annoying gray heron begins to fly to the window, suddenly speaking in a human voice and reporting that Mahito’s mother is really actually alive. To find it, you need to penetrate a stone tower with an entrance littered with stones, once built by the boy’s great-great-grandfather, a great scientist who “read so many books that he went crazy” and then mysteriously disappeared.

The first attempt to get into the tower is unsuccessful, but when Natsuko suddenly disappears, Mahito, along with the heron and the maid Kiriko, goes in search of her. At this point, the harmonious narrative part of the film ends, and together with the heroes we are thrown into an incredible other world, where the heron turns into a funny toothy man with a warty nose, and the ancient maid turns into a brave young fisherman. Here live giant fish, the souls of unborn children (they look like round squeaking kawaii creatures called “warawara”), devouring pelicans and paramilitary troops of huge parrots walking in formation – this is how the war going on in reality responds in this dimension. Vivid expressionist landscapes alternate with caricatured images of a parrot state, enclosed in a kind of Tower of Babel. In its endless corridors and countless rooms, Mahito searches for his mother and stepmother, and finds the point of fragile balance on which this whole strange world order rests.

However, having received an offer to stay and become the guardian of this balance, he decides to return, thus making the first adult choice – to learn to accept pain and loss in order to move on with his life. This calm, humble conclusion after a chaotic whirlpool of fantastic images and details acts like an unexpected awakening after a vivid, confusing dream. But this is exactly what Miyazaki himself intends to do – move on. After all, by the time of the international premiere in September at the Toronto Film Festival, it became known that he was not going to go anywhere and was already working on a new project – good news both for the audience and for the almost 83-year-old director, who, judging by “The Boy,” and the bird,” still has something to say.