Mahito is a 12-year-old whose mother was killed in a hospital fire in 1943 during the Pacific War. Mahito’s father marries his late wife’s sister, Mahito’s aunt, and they pack up and move to the countryside. Still processing the loss of his mother, let alone his new surroundings, Mahito encounters a rambunctious heron and follows it to a sealed-off tower on the outskirts of the property. He’s warded off by the old maids at his new home, but he knows someone or something is calling him to that structure.

Not much more in The Boy and the Heron is linear, let alone describable, as Miyazaki takes flight on a fantastical odyssey across nature, spirituality and the balancing forces of the universe. We’re talking heaven, family, peace, beauty, life and death, expressed through the imagination of a child as seen through the eyes of Miyazaki, in
his first film since 2013’s The Wind Rises.

The celebrated filmmaker (My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle) is a master world builder whose films are tactile and hand-drawn, standing out in a world of computer-animated contemporaries. That human touch is part of the staggering sensory overload he creates in his movies, where anywhere you look, there’s something to gush over, whether it’s his depiction of nature or just the colours from which he draws.

It’s overwhelming on several levels: emotionally, visually, storytelling-wise. The Boy and the Heron is said to be Miyazaki’s final film, but that was said about The Wind Rises, too. It doesn’t matter. What matters is there’s no one else like him, and this is a movie about a great many things, devastating in its richness. You watch it with your heart.

Boluwatife Adesina
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Boluwatife Adesina is a media writer and the helmer of the Downtown Review page. He’s probably in a cinema near you.