The Boy and the Heron: A Review

THE BOY AND THE HERON

There were some who were surprised if not shocked when The Boy and the Heron was announced as the winner for the Best Animated Feature Academy Award. It was a surprise because traditional, hand-drawn animation had usually been shut out. It was a surprise because most prognosticators had tapped the highly praised Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to be the almost inevitable winner. When you call Across the Spider-Verse "one of the greatest films ever made in the history of cinema", it suggests that it is a hard act to compete with. Those who have seen both Across the Spider-Verse and The Boy and the Heron, I think, will come to the conclusion that the Academy made the right choice. Visually stunning, with an incredibly imaginative story, The Boy and the Heron (originally titled How Do You Live?) is perhaps long but well worth the time.

Near the end of the Second World War, young Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki) survives the firebombing of Tokyo, but he cannot save his mother Hisako, who is at a hospital hit during the bombing. His father, Soichi (Takuya Kimura), who runs an aircraft company, decides to spirit Mahito to the relative safety of the countryside. He also introduces Mahito to his new, pregnant wife Natsuko, who happens to be Hisako's sister. 

Mahito does not adjust well to his new surroundings. He is civil towards his aunt/stepmother, but he still struggles with school and the grief of his mother's death. He is also being pestered by a large grey heron, who eventually begins speaking and taunting him. Mahito gives chase, and finds a mysterious, dilapidated castle once built by his great-uncle. This is a place filled with mystery and magic, which Mahito is warned away from.

However, when Natsuko wanders into the forest where the castle is, Mahito defies those around him to search for her. From there, Mahito and the heron, revealed to have a humanoid being inside, must navigate a strange world made up of cannibal parakeets, fire goddesses and the spirits of those yet to be born, known here as the warawara. Going with them is Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki), one of the old women who serve at the Maki home but who in this world becomes young and forces Mahito and the heron-man to work together. Will Mahito find Natsuko? What of Himi (Aimyon), the fire goddess and warawara protector who has a connection to all of them? Who will live and who will die as they work their way back to Mahito's world?

The Boy and the Heron runs a little over two hours, which might drain the viewer. That is probably the film's only major flaw, for everything else is breathtaking. The animation is astonishing, with moments of visual splendor that leave the viewer mesmerized. Even in the beginning, when Tokyo is being firebombed, somehow the destruction going on is very impressive. Seeing Mahito see his idea of his mother engulfed in flamed is not horrifying but surprisingly moving. Things as large as the march of the villainous parakeet army to as small as the warawara rising to the heavens are beautiful images.

The Boy and the Heron is a showcase for how animation can create these fantastical worlds not bound by logic. Where else but in animation can giant cannibal parakeets or images of women melting into water be seen as possible? One looks at The Boy and the Heron, purely on a visual level, and be swept away by its inventiveness and creativity?   

Story wise, The Boy and the Heron is also wildly impressive. The film is about a young man, traumatized, who at one point in the story harms himself, coming to terms with his grief. The original Japanese title, How Do You Live? comes from a book that his late mother left him to write on. In this, we see how Mahito still carries, metaphorically and perhaps literally, this great grief which his new situation does not help. Could his long journey be, if not a literal dream, a way for him to work through his grief, his loss and confusion to find peace? When he learns who Miri really is, he attempts to warn her of the future. She, however, cheerfully dismisses it, perhaps signaling that we cannot escape our fate for good or ill.

"Forgetting is normal," Mahito is told near the end of the film. The Boy and the Heron is more than just filled with beautiful animation. It is a moving story of loss and resilience. While again perhaps a bit longer than it should be, the viewer will find The Boy and the Heron to be a beautiful piece of work.

DECISION: A-

The Wind Rises: A Review

THE WIND RISES

Jiro Dreams of Airplanes...

It's the strangest thing in the world if one thinks about The Wind Rises.  It is an animated biopic about the creator of the Japanese Zero, the airplane that would earn infamy during World War II for the 'kamikaze' flights the Japanese pilots made in a last-ditch effort to stop the advancing American fleet from crushing the Empire of the Rising Sun.  Is the film then a celebration about the man who helped create a machine that killed millions of people, another sad example of Japan's refusal to accept its role in the Second World War? 

It is not so simple as that.  The Wind Rises is less about Japan's failures than it is about the desire to create something beautiful, only to find that same creation used for evil. 

Jiro Horikoshi dreams of taking to the skies, finding the world above so beautiful.  His vision prevents him from being a pilot, but with the inspiration of Italian airplane designer Giovanni Caproni (who comes to him in dream sequences), Jiro decides to devote his life to designing his own planes.

Over the course of his life, he meets the love of his life Naoko in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923 and is reunited with her many years later.  He also moves up quickly and methodically through the Mitsubishi Company, where Jiro is somewhat oblivious to all but his beautiful designs, even if the slowly encroaching war and Japan's growing militarism soon starts taking over the designs.  The government even sponsors for Jiro and his colleagues to travel to Germany to see their innovations (and I think he might have witnessed the Kristallnacht attacks). Naoko and Jiro's love is threatened by her tuberculosis, but despite the obstacles they marry.

In the end, even though his Zeroes became instruments of death, Caproni comes to him one last time, telling him he did create something beautiful, and we see Naoko in a vision one last time as well.

What is glorious about animation is that the imagination can do so much to make things real, and The Wind Rises does so to an extraordinary and breathtaking degree.  Visually the film is beautiful, so breathtakingly beautiful.  The opening sequence has five minutes of no dialogue but with a series of beautiful images.  Thanks to animation, we can see characters walk on wings of planes, and even the flight of Zeroes over their heads yields such beauty that I don't think instruments of war and death were never so splendidly rendered.

Even the moments which wouldn't lend themselves to being artworks become, under Miyazaki's directing, some extraordinary sequences.  The earthquake sequence is so stunning that it would be impossible to imagine that the most lavish CGI would or could ever top it.  The violence the Japanese see on the periphery in Germany is also something almost lovely.  We even get a beautiful moment both visually and story-wise with Naoko and Jiro: their own version of 'the balcony scene'. 

I am at pains to point out that there is a difference between making something visually beautiful and romanticizing the same moments.  Miyazaki is not suggesting that the Kanto Earthquake or Kristallnacht are themselves beautiful, or that the actions of the Zeroes are things to think of as 'art'.  Far from it: in The Wind Rises, Jiro is aware that machinery, even that which he creates in order to build something of great beauty, can be (and sadly, oftentimes is) transformed into something for destruction and death.  Jiro believes that his planes are not for war or for making money, but he I think understood that the people he worked for, who in a sense were his patrons, did not share this noble vision. 

I should also point out that The Wind Rises is an extremely loose biopic of Horikoshi.  It is 'based on' his life, but it is not a strict biopic.  Rather, I think it is Miyazaki's meditation on creating, on working to make something beautiful but how others can make things into something created with love for love into something nefarious and dark.  The Wind Rises is not a celebration of Horikoshi's fighter planes or the actions of the pilots.  This is not a film which attempts to hide or downplay Japan's dark past.  It is, rather, a celebration of the creative process, and an acknowledgement that Japan has still, over a half-century later, still failed to come to grips with its great shame of aggression.

The trauma of its actions still sting the Japanese spirit, so much so that it finds it difficult to fully accept.  The Wind Rises is miles away from a scene I remember from Neon Genesis Evangelion.  In the latter, Shinji is in class and the teacher says something along the lines of, "For some reason, the United States and Japan found themselves at war".   This may have been a sly dig from NGE at Japan's willful blindness.  The Wind Rises, while it did trouble me because it is about the creator of the Zero, is again not a celebration of the actions.  It is almost a lament for how something of beauty can be turned to something of ugliness. 

If I can find one fault with The Wind Rises, it is that when they went to Germany, the church they passed by while on the train looked vaguely Russian with its onion domes.  A minor flaw, granted, but there it is. 

"Airplanes are beautiful dreams," Caproni tells Jiro.  Oh, Miyazaki-sensei, so are your films.

So are your films...

1903-1982

DECISION: A-

Howl's Moving Castle: A Review (Review #125)

HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE

A Witch Is A Dream Your Heart Makes...

I'm a stickler on foreign-language films: by and large I support subtitles and am opposed to dubbing. Having one group of actors speak lines over the performances of others actors strikes me as akin to destroying the film. To my mind, the original performances were the performances intended to be seen by everyone. I can see myself supporting dubbing when the original actors recreate their performances in another language (Catherine Denueve in English or Jodie Foster in French for example).

This isn't wrong to my mind because the original actor is merely recreating his/her role. The same holds for animation, for the most part. Hayao Miyasaki (aside from being a genius) has a way of transcending that rule. It might have to do with the fact that strong English-speaking actors are hired to speak the lines. It could also be that the animation is just so good that the voices in any language, done well, will always fit the images. This is the case with Howl's Moving Castle, a brilliant film that shows animation is not the same as 'cartoons', which unfortunately most Americans tend to think as one and the same.

For reasons of this review I will be discussing the English-language version of Howl's Moving Castle, and thus I will refer to the English-speaking actors as opposed to the original Japanese actors.

Sophie (Emily Mortimer) is a shy, insecure milliner in an unnamed land (though given that the novel the film was based on was written by British authoress Diana Wynne Jones it would be safe to say that it suggests the United Kingdom or France). She goes through life no sense of her true worth, doing her best to stay out of the way of such beings as the wizard Howl (Christian Bale) or the Witch of the Waste (Lauren Bacall).

One day, a mysterious man saves her from a group of rough soldiers harassing her, literally whisking her up. Later that night, a mysterious woman comes to the shop. Sophie tells her the shop is closed, but discovers too late it is the Witch of the Waste, who has now cursed her, turning her into an old woman, right down to her voice (Jean Simmons). Sophie opts to run away and see if she can find a way to reverse the curse, coming across a scarecrow-type being she names "Turnip-Head", and Howl's Moving Castle. She ventures in, and there meets the fire demon Calcifer (Billy Crystal), a young apprentice wizard named Markl (Josh Hutcherson), and Howl himself. Sophie decides to become their cleaning lady, much to everyone's confusion.

While he is a powerful wizard, Howl is a bit of a wimp and coward, running away from the Witch of the Waste and the powerful sorceress Madame Suliman (Blythe Danner), who is the Court Sorcerer. Suliman demands both Howl and The Witch of the Waste aid the kingdom in their war against a neighboring nation, and while the latter jumps at the chance the former wants nothing to do with either the war or Suliman, his former mentor.

Sophie goes in his place to reject the kingdom's request for service, but Suliman will have none of it. She already turned to Witch of the West into an old woman with no powers and will do the same to Howl if he continues to refuse. Howl manages to rescue Sophie and even the Witch, where they take flight in his castle. Sophie learns Howl has been transforming himself into a bird to stop the bombing raids, but soon Suliman and her Shadow Henchmen track the group down. Howl wants to sacrifice himself for Sophie and vice versa. Eventually they help each other, and even help Turnip-Head, who has been devotedly following them and joining them for most of their adventures.

Howl's Moving Castle has extraordinary imagery, which has become the trademark of Miyazaki. In the first few moments, when Howl's Castle is marching in the fields, the mists are so beautifully drawn that they do look real. There is also a beautiful moment when the mysterious stranger rescues Young Sophie and they literally walk on air. The scene is already beautiful as filmed, but Joe Hisaishi's score makes it pure magic. The art direction is amazing: there is this feeling of a Belle Epoque world, which when juxtaposed with the flying battleships makes it even more breathtaking.

There are also intelligent themes in Howl's Moving Castle. The firebombing of Sophie's village must in some way be a collective Japanese memory of the firebombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. The imagery is so similar, and terrifying. Miyazaki is a pacifist, and the condemnation of war is evident.

If I may digress, there are scenes early in the film when the population cheers the coming of war (which were reminiscent of scenes from Doctor Zhivago to my mind), but at the end, when the citizens are being bombed and forced to flee, we can see the eagerness of war replaced by the horror of war. A second, more subtle theme, is that of how governments use technology (in this case, the wizards) for the pursuit of war; when one thinks about how governments today spend billions upon billions to build and pursue nuclear bombs while their people go hungry, homeless, and uneducated, is not something left in the realm of fantasy films (unfortunately).

The voices are brilliant. Bale shows that, while being mostly serious in Howl's Moving Castle (as he is in most every project he's in) he actually can be funny, especially when Howl mourns the loss of his beautiful hair color. Simmons and Mortimer convince us that they both are Sophie in various stages of age: the latter with a shy innocence and the former with a calm wisdom. Bacall manages to shift our view of the Witch of the Waste as well, starting as the villain in the first part to then make her into almost a sweet yet shrewd grandmother in the latter, and even being a lovelorn woman near the end.

Hutcherson (who was 12 at the time) makes Markl an endearing character, one who is eager to be as powerful as Howl but who also yearns for the love of a mother/sister-type. Danner is calmly cold as Suliman, who is determined to be victorious, but she never rages like a traditional villain. It is her calmness as Suliman that makes her more frightening, but in the end we see even she has a lightness to her. Crystal's voice is very distinctive, to the point where I kept thinking it was Billy Crystal and not Califer. It was the weakest point because it made it look like Howl's Moving Castle was going for the cute factor, something aimed strictly for children when the film is far richer and deeper than that.

Howl's Moving Castle is beautiful, intelligent, a work of a true master. The only real flaw in the film is that people may see that it is hand-drawn and decide it is for children only. This is a tragic mistake many parents make: thinking that if a film is animated, it must be made for those in elementary school and not for them. Far from it.

Howl's Moving Castle is a film for everyone. Children may enjoy it, but adults will appreciate it. It's the intelligence both behind it and within it that elevate it about most "children's films". Parents should watch the film before putting it for their children to decide if their offspring will be able to enjoy it.

"The heart is a heavy burden", one of the characters says. This kind of insight is not found in many films, and it's extremely rare in an animated one. The film is a pure work of imagination and wisdom blended in extraordinary visuals. Howl's Moving Castle is just that: moving.

My hat goes off to Hayao Miyazaki.

DECISION: A+