The Best Movies of the Year: Falling Apart with The Boy and the Heron

I love when an animated world falls apart. I love when there is formal collapse, an existential admission that even in universes painted and drawn, it’s all barely holding together. When something is so clearly created, tearing it down in the same breath is grand and petty all at once, like Seinfeld‘s all-encompassing faux pas. Few pieces of art can truly capture the feeling of a spiraled catastrophe, and even fewer can make it fun. It makes life’s cruel absurdities a little more tolerable when you realize that even Daffy Duck can’t escape his omnipotent trickster god in Duck Amuck. The crumbling, tactile surrealism of Don Herzfeldt’s Rejected ironically grounds us in its simplicity: Instability afflicts us all, stick figures and giant bananas alike. The suffering and chaos of these cartoons is hilarious, relatable—even soothing. Their bodies warp. The very barriers of their worlds shatter. The paper they are drawn upon is balled up and thrown away. And in our laughter (masking and/or accompanying our horror) is relief. But the best animated movie of 2023, Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, offers a disintegrating visualization of artistic world-building that is both endlessly open to interpretation and undeniably optimistic.

You might think, since The Boy and the Heron is the alleged swan song of the Studio Ghibli co-founder, that Miyazaki views the unavoidable life cycle of artistry—inspiration, influence, atrophy, obscurity—bittersweetly. Perhaps all the more so considering that he poured himself, as our Autumn Wright observes, into both the heroic-yet-flawed Mahito (Soma Santoki) and his obsessive Granduncle (Shōhei Hino).

Mahito’s journey through a fantastical kingdom is one of wondrous discovery and acceptance, while his god-king Granduncle (who read too many books and lost his mind) tinkers with his creation in the winter of his life. One is coming of age in a magical world, the other seeing his reign over that world end. These are the two poles of life’s finite trajectory and, very loosely, the two characters of Genzaburo Yoshino’s book How Do You Live?, which The Boy and the Heron adapts. The Boy and the Heron has time-earned wisdom to impart, though it’s not embittered towards the young or precious about the old. These characters are seeing their familiar lives slip from their grasps, and they fight this transition tooth and nail. But, among its myriad readings, The Boy and the Heron is a film about embracing change—even when it crashes down upon you.

Opening with an Expressionist WWII inferno, The Boy and the Heron’s hectic flames initially bring nothing but loss to Mahito. His mother dies in the blaze. But in these ashes, and in the ruins to come, there is the chance for ecological succession—hardy new growth springing up after a wildfire. Mahito just can’t see it yet.

The shell-shocked beginning, where Mahito wanders quietly through his new life in the countryside, is shaken back to reality by a symbol of unreality’s potential: The Tower. This landmark spans dimensions, not unlike Stephen King’s Dark Tower, and was erected long ago by his Granduncle. It is here that Mahito can save his aunt-turned-stepmom Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura)–no wonder the kid is having a hard time at home—and, in so doing, accept her. While she isn’t replacing his mother, she is an addition to his life after this loss. If that’s too subtle, she’s also pregnant with Mahito’s half-sibling.

The broad images Miyazaki paints across Granduncle’s constructed world repeat this pattern, abundant with simple, mythic symbolism. The wartime setting carries with it atomic anxiety and hope for its aftermath. What is possible in the rubble of the past? The eventual collapse of the tower-verse, filled with a literally bird-brained military, takes place as an Empire violently ends and a new nation tentatively emerges in Japan.

The soul-like warawara that Mahito encounters (the blobbiest blobs Ghibli has produced yet) are hungry little babies ready to be born, floating to the real world in spirals not unlike a double helix. The pelicans that gobble the warawara up, and are subsequently shot down in flames, mimic fighter planes and their pilots. One casualty, whom Mahito finds flightless and bloodied, laments the forces beyond its control that brought it here. It’s an unjust world, made by a fallible creator. Birth and death are terribly close together. Cruelty is the only way to survive. Unless, of course, you tear it all down.

When Mahito first talks to his Granduncle, the spiky-haired wizard is managing a tiny tower of toy blocks. It’s the world’s toughest Jenga set, all archways and cylinders. There’s power in the small stones, but the boy notices that it’s not without its baggage: These potent artifacts are carved from the stuff of graves—headstones and mausoleum marble. When Granduncle tells Mahito that he needs a successor, from his bloodline, to take over as Supreme Stacker, Mahito declines. Those blocks, these materials, aren’t for him.

The second time they meet, Granduncle asks again for Mahito to stay in this bird-filled dreamscape, to inherit this creative responsibility and, if those blocks weren’t the right fit for him, to reshape this world in his own image. Mahito declines again, this time citing his own imperfections.

It’s easy to see the autobiography in this part of Mahito’s quest. Aside from the connections to Miyazaki’s Ghibli peers, his son Goro is actively following in his filmmaking footsteps; he recently directed the (poorly received) Ghibli movie Earwig and the Witch. Though Miyazaki is, inexplicably, not slowing down with age, he is more explicitly grappling with what it means to hand over your life’s work. Whether this massive project Granduncle has built—an imaginative alternate universe filled with silly little guys, bucolic landscapes, mouth-watering meals, unexpected dangers, and heartfelt life lessons—flourishes or withers is up to those that come after. A legacy is only half-formed while you’re still alive.

That’s the easy part. The obvious stuff. The more pressing questions this moment raises, and the ones that make the finale of The Boy and the Heron so moving, are those that follow. One involves the morality of passing on your life’s work: Is it a blessing to bequeath a lifetime of creative effort, or a curse to assign your obsessions to someone else? Are you so proud that you assume that your creation is worth not only your own time here, but someone else’s? The next question looks further forward, and wonders if the previous questions are moot: Is it ok for a world to fall apart?