About Miyazaki and "The Boy and the Heron"

On March 11 this year, the news that Hayao Miyazaki's new film "The Boy and the Heron" won an Oscar set off a wave of cheers and astonishment among fans, such as me. After all, following the release of "The Wind Rises" in 2013 and his "official" announcement of retirement, everyone thought they would never see another work by Miyazaki. Yet, after a decade, he has delivered another monumental piece.

Here's a brief on the plot: After the death of his mother in a hospital fire, the young Mahito moves to the countryside with his father and stepmother, Natsuko, to form a new family. Deep in grief, Mahito struggles to adapt to his new environment. After fighting with classmates, he hurts himself with a stone, causing his unknowing father and stepmother great distress and guilt. Later, following a talking heron, he enters a mysterious abandoned tower in search of his supposedly deceased mother and the missing Natsuko, only to find himself in a fantastical "Realm of the Dead." There, he makes friends, reunites with his mother as a young girl, and meets the creator of this other world, his great-uncle. After a series of incredible adventures, he returns to reality.

The film's production company promotes the movie as a "Hayao Miyazaki autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation." It also notes that the film portrays aspects of Miyazaki's own youth that he had never depicted before. Indeed, one can find many reflections of the author's own experiences within the film.

Hayao Miyazaki was born in 1941 in Bunkyo, Tokyo, the second of four brothers. His father was an employee of Miyazaki Airplane, a family business. During World War II, the family was evacuated to Utsunomiya and Kanuma cities. As their factory was involved in military production, they managed to maintain their livelihood during the severe shortages of the war's final phases, allowing Miyazaki a relatively free childhood.

The film opens with the harrowing sounds of air raid sirens echoing through the dark night sky. Scenes of panic, a boy curled up at home, streets engulfed in flames, and people dying in agony reflect Miyazaki's traumatic memories of the Utsunomiya air raid in 1945 when he was four years old.

Unlike "Howl's Moving Castle" and other works that depict brutal battle scenes, this film sprinkles details of wartime life throughout the story—tanks driving through the streets, soldiers being cheered on by crowds as they prepare to deploy, old women's joyful expressions at the sight of canned food, and Mahito's father occasionally discussing the war situation and aircraft parts made at the factory.

The film uses symbolism to represent soldiers and civilians in the other world. For example, the large, seemingly innocent but ready-to-kill parrots symbolize the general public in modern nations. They are not evil, just a foolish "mob”. When the Parrot King, dressed in a military uniform and wielding a sword, farewells the parrot citizens, the colorful scene reminds me of the dancing squares in "Howl's Moving Castle" at the outbreak of war. The signs the parrots hold read "DUCH!," which means "leader" in Italian, depicting a modern militaristic state rallying behind its leader.

In "The Boy and the Heron", stones are also a crucial element. The tower created by the great-uncle initially was a giant meteorite that fell from the sky, and all his power comes from this celestial rock. As Mahito adventures in the other world, stones actively express opinions through crackling electricity and interfere with intruders; moreover, whenever Mahito visits his great-uncle, he crosses a field of fallen meteorites. As the master of this other world, the great-uncle's daily task seems to be manipulating and calculating a tower made of white stones, and the day this tower collapses will mark the disintegration of this world. At the film's end, before returning to Tokyo, Mahito packs a small white stone he brought back from the other world.

In the lineage of Miyazaki's works, stones often appear as sources of flight and power, representing both beautiful freedom and destructive evil. The dual nature of stones is most clearly depicted in "Castle in the Sky." The protagonist Sheeta's blue flying stone saves her from falling into an abyss multiple times; when activated by her stone, the underground mine's flying stones light up, turning the entire cavern into a dazzling galaxy. However, Laputa was also doomed to self-destruction because it isolated itself from the life-nourishing earth due to its advanced technology and the crystals of flying stones.

"Castle in the Sky" tells a similar story. Moved by the beauty of a meteor shower, Howl captures a meteor, sacrificing his own heart to gain magical powers. While Howl initially yearned for beauty and power, his inability to control the power nearly led him to become a demon.

Returning to "The Boy and the Heron", stones here also represent power—both creative and disastrous. An old woman in the mansion tells Mahito's father that the Western-style tower in the courtyard isn't man-made but appeared suddenly before the Meiji Restoration as a massive meteorite hit the ground. The great-uncle became obsessed with it, and attempts to enclose it with walls led to severe casualties. One day, driven mad by his studies, he disappeared into the tower...

In the film, the heron leads Mahito to a stone gate in the tower inscribed with the words "fecemi la divina potestate," from Dante's "Inferno," meaning "The divine power, the highest wisdom, and the original love created me." The gates of Hell in Dante's poem represent the Roman gates that humanity passed through into modernity. The terrifying sights in Hell are reflections of the real world, which the protagonist must witness firsthand. The inscription on the tunnel door also suggests that the heron leads Mahito into a hellish realm of the dead, subtly hinting at a metaphor for Western modern civilization.

Thus, the tower in the movie might be understood as follows: the initial meteorite's fall symbolizes the intense impact of Western civilization on Japan before the Meiji Restoration. The remaining high tower represents the physical embodiment of that civilization. Filled with books, scrolls, and Western statues, the great-uncle's obsessive study of Western civilization and attempts to create a fully Westernized ideal world are evident. Yet he was lost. The world he constructs and desperately tries to balance, both a realm of the dead and a modern state that mimics Western culture, is doomed to collapse. When this world is on the brink of falling apart, the great-uncle hopes his descendants will carry on his legacy. But Mahito sees through it: the white "building blocks" used to construct the tower of civilization aren't grown from the earth but are stones carrying the original sin of Western modernity—filled with stains of slaughter and death, much like the stones of a tomb.

One common misconception about Miyazaki’s work is that they always offer healing because they allow us to escape into his fantastical world for a warm, beautiful dream. However, this is not the intended purpose of the majority of his works. Miyazaki's films have a critical nature that reflects reality, demanding that we confront history and the present and not use his works as tools for escaping reality. In an era where nihilism pervades, staying alert, thinking clearly, living honestly, and building a compassionate world with those around us—perhaps this is the life lesson that the 83-year-old Miyazaki, after a lifetime of internal conflicts and pains, wants to share with us.