Even when his characters are articulate, they express themselves often in roundabout ways, their profundity dangling in a state of almostness. When Chihiro in Spirited Away is told, “Nothing that happens is ever forgotten, even if you can’t remember it,” how to make sense of the contradiction that is inherent in the statement, one that both hints at and recedes from clarity? When Mahito is told that he must forget what happened, in order to move on with his life, how to frame this cultivated amnesia?
Miyazaki’s posture against such worries is one of optimism, “Easy to understand films are boring. Logical storylines sacrifice creativity. I’m all about breaking conventions. Kids get it. They do not operate on logic.”
Before embarking on his penultimate film, The Wind Rises, about Jiro Horikoshi, the Japanese aircraft engineer who designed a Japanese fighter plane Mitsubishi Zero, Miyazaki crafted a manga on the same — this was meant for adults, not children. While struggling to reconceptualize the comic as a film, he sighed, “This one isn’t just for children. It’s hard.”
It did not help that while attempting to storyboard the 1923 earthquake that Horikoshi lived through, Miyazaki experienced the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami that devastated Eastern Japan. Months later, speaking to his team who did not believe they needed to live through this devastation again, through their artistry, Miyazaki said, “Will we make a fantasy again? About a girl’s life? I don’t think that’ll do. The Wind Rises is about the wind of a new era blowing hard. About trying to live in that. Our film must be an answer to changes in this era.”
In the film, Miyazaki wove Jiro’s complicated legacy of the maker of fighter jets that were used in kamikaze operations with a love story between Jiro and the tuberculosis-ridden Nahoko. Every success of the flying expedition coincided with a failure in her health; conversations about the Nazi takeover cut in by news that she had fallen ill; the success of the test flight interrupted by a premonition that she had indeed died. Dreamscapes, for the first time, began to feel like escapes, not just for the character, but for Miyazaki too.
A Film Adrift
The original Japanese title of The Boy And The Heron translates as How Do You Live? This was taken from Genzaburō Yoshino’s book about a 15-year old boy navigating the death of his father. When he fails to stand up to bullies who are pulping his friends, he is pulled into the pits of pathos. Why can he not act when he knows what to do?
When asked about what the answer to the original Japanese title is, Miyazaki said, “I am making this movie because I do not have the answer.” And, perhaps, it is that question, like a baton, his cinema is passing along. A question that even a child must hold, if not ask themselves so existentially.
If The Boy And The Heron feels like a culmination of Miyazaki’s preoccupations — emerging from central events in Japanese history, from the Meiji Restoration to World War II to the recession of the Nineties that led to Japan’s “Lost Decade”; sending children off into fearsome yet fantastical portals; an ever-present grief from loss; the alienation of new worlds softened by confident, demanding adults (usually female) and squelching, small beings (usually silent) — the Miyazaki filmography also feels adrift. There is a strong melancholy, and this is especially true of The Boy And The Heron, that drives main protagonists, an aimless but all-consuming grief. If The Wind Rises is the character arriving at grief, The Boy And The Heron is about reshaping the hole this grief has bored into Mahito, neither filling it, nor distracting it.
And here, we come back to the central question — how can a film for children be fuelled forward by sadness?