The Boy and The Heron (2023) : Recap, Review and Reflection

chanting the frogs and fish spirits from the movie, The Boy and The Heron, aka my first movie/ hive post of 2024. 🎉🎉 Happy New Year everybody! Sorry, I've been gone for a while. Anybody miss me? 😂 I actually have a New Year resolution of being more active on Hive this year and it took me 2 weeks to settle into that, so from now on, let's see how I do.

I want to start new year and new post with something related from my last post : My 2023 Cinematic Carousel: Hits, Misses and Question Marks. I did mention that one of the movies that I'm looking forward to is Ghibli's latest animation The Boy and The Heron.

Also, I was kinda fed up with Hayao Miyazaki (The founder of Ghibli's studio), the man who cried retired. He has been saying that years ago and yet he still continues making movies. However, people have been saying good things about this one and claimed that it's really gonna be his last and final masterpiece before he's truly retiring.

Enough with the prologue, let's start with

🌟 the Recap 🌟

The (English) name of the movie already gave away that the main character of the movie was a boy called "Mahito," whose bedridden mother perished in a hospital fire during World War II in Tokyo. He had to move away to his mother's upper-class family house, where he found out that his dad would be marrying and having a child with Natsuko, his own aunt (his mom's little sister). 😦

Feeling weird as I am, I looked up some information about it, and here's what I found.

This kind of marriage is called Sororate Marriage. It's a type of marriage in which a husband engages in marriage or sexual relations with the sister of his wife, usually after the death of his wife or if his wife has proven infertile. source

In Mahito's case to inherit his mom's family wealth and status, which I think it can be understandable during this wartime.

Mahito had a really hard time adjusting himself to this new situation and was still mourning his mom. He struggled with school and hurt himself so he wouldn't have to go to school. While he was resting, a grey heron, able to speak like a human, had lured him into the mysterious building. Eventually, Mahito decided to follow the heron to rescue his aunt, who had just disappeared into the woods, and no maids could find her. One of the old maids had come along with him. She tried to stop Mahito, but he insisted on going. No need to tell you that he had a long journey ahead of him. A 2-hour+ long journey, to be more specific.

! [Hidden Spoiler nr1 of The Boy and The Heron] He entered another world, which is called "the underworld," where he met the unborn souls and multiple kinds of man-eating birds. With the help of the heron and his two new good friends, Kiriko (the hunter lady) and Himi (the fire lady), he made it to the Labor room, where Natsuko was. He found out that the underworld and the real world are actually connected. Kiriko was the maid that came with him, and Himi was his mom (when she was young).

! [Hidden Spoiler nr2 of The Boy and The Heron] He tried to save Natsuko but failed, and he was brought to "The creator" of this world, who was actually his own bloodline great-granduncle! The great uncle offered him to continue his legacy in this world by just stacking 13 blocks to preserve this beautiful world. Mahito declined and decided to go back to the real world. That decision made the whole underworld collapse as Mahito and his friends made it back just in time.

I really needed a lot of time to process what happened in the movie because it's indeed confusing, still, I wanna challenge myself in the new year and just write out of my comfort zone without having a complete understanding of the movie. Here we go!

🌟 the Review 🌟

I had quite a high expectation for this movie since I want to be impressed like the first time I watched Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle. After watching it my verdict is... What?? Yea, guys, I'm completely blank coming out of the cinema, not knowing where I am or what I'm thinking. The movie just took me to my own "underworld".

The soundtrack went perfectly well as always and the picturesque animation is catching. There are times that it's weird and creepy, but I believe that's the essence of Miyazaki's work. I thank him for coming back on the track of this fantasy journey and not playing on a boring mature issue like his last work. This one is really a standing ovation of his life work to go down with his retirement.

The cinema that I watched, played in Japanese with Thai and English Subtitles, so I was a little sad that I didn't get to experience the amazing voice actors. But I can see how well it was cast and when I go watch it again (That's a must for me), I'll watch it in English.

Here comes...

🌟 the Reflection 🌟

Finally, I came to the point with myself the reason why this movie is Miyazaki himself. The journey of Mahito to be asked at the end what he wants to do with his life is what Miyazaki tried to make sense of this life-work Studio Ghibli. I learned that your choice to act on something always matters, but it's never the end of the world.

No matter what happens the world will carry on and we will go on. If one thing doesn't happen, it doesn't mean that another thing won't. What's important is your attitude towards your decision. You can always make what you have better. Maybe you just have to learn to wear the optimist glasses and look for something good that is meant for you.