The Boy and the Heron
This wonderfully strange animated film is rich with symbolism about violence, hierarchy, and fate.
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This post is part of the ‘One Take’ weekly series analysing the politics of a film currently showing at the cinemas.
Content warnings: Bereavement; Self-harm; Pregnancy and complications.
Note: Given that, at time of writing, The Boy and the Heron is still showing in UK cinemas, this analysis only lays out as much of the film’s scenario as is necessary so as to avoid spoilers. It is therefore suitable to be read either before or after watching the film, while hopefully still enriching the viewer’s appreciation of it either way.
Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron is a fantastically unnerving and deeply symbolic film. It commences in Tokyo with a young boy, Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki), who is awoken one night during the Second World War to find that the hospital his mother is in has been set aflame. A year after her death, he moves with his industrialist father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura) to the countryside to live with his father’s new wife, Mahito’s mother’s younger sister Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), who is pregnant with Shoichi’s new child.
They live on Natsuko’s family estate with her gregarious, elderly maids. There Mahito becomes intrigued with a closed-up old tower built by Natsuko’s great-uncle, but which Natsuko and the maids warn him to steer clear of. Mahito gets into conflict with other boys at his new school, and returning home deliberately wounds his head with a rock. The injury requires treatment from a local doctor, and he is ordered to stay in bed and rest. Yet Mahito finds himself being taunted by a talking heron (Masaki Suda), who claims he can take him to find his mother.
Natsuko herself becomes unwell from the strains of the pregnancy, and one day disappears into the nearby forest. Mahito heads into the forest with one of the maids, Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki), reluctantly in tow, and enters the tower, where he encounters the heron, as well as his great-great uncle (Shōhei Hino). There, he is plunged into a strange world wholly out of place and time, in which he encounters souls yet to be born, man-eating parakeets, and the mysterious Lady Himi (Aimyon).
War and fascism
Mizaki was born in Tokyo during the Second World War, and so The Boy and the Heron’s point of departure is clearly at least semi-autobiographical. Yet his choice of time and place of setting also seems politically portentous, and one cannot help but seek metaphors for the war and for fascism in this parable. The tower itself is both familial heirloom and alien imposition; mystical and chaotic and yet with the great-uncle as its remote orchestrator; apparently timeless and yet arrived in living memory. In this regard, it might be read as standing in for the Japanese emperor system, which by blending industrial modernisation with legitimation through history and sublimity, created the space in which Japanese fascism could emerge.1
In this analogy, it is surely the parakeets who most embody fascism: small creatures grown to an abnormal scale, violent and ravenous and always teeming in huge crowds, with a cult of personality around their own King (Jun Kunimura). They mirror the society beyond the tower, with its own mass mobilisation of flesh and machinery for destruction, its motivation by greed and resentment, its capacity to inflict violence upon others but also – as with Mahito’s head wound – upon itself. Birds, and other animals, can be understood on one level, as illustrative of humankind’s dehumanisation.
Yet we might also see the monstrosities of the world within the tower as symbolic of contemporary ecological disaster, of humanmade climate change, habitat destruction, and species endangerment. The violence of the birds, their unnatural feasting habits, is the outcome of their expulsion into worlds where food is scarce; a set of circumstances that puts the not-yet-born into harm’s way. We could consider the parallels in the relationship between the resurgence of the far right today and environmental catastrophe, which they readily accelerate, while at the same time reacting violently to the displaced.
Class and reproduction
A connected theme that recurs throughout The Bird and the Heron is that of social hierarchy, and the ways it is reproduced. Shoichi’s wealth (like that of Miyazaki’s own father) comes from producing military aircraft, Natsuko’s is inherited, and through this they and Mahito can escape the destruction being inflicted upon Tokyo. They are waited upon and treated with deference, and Shoichi is showily materialistic. Yet these legacies of privilege are cursed. The machinery Shoichi makes his money through building is the kind that also killed his wife. Shoichi’s ostentation when he takes Mahito to school sparks resentment from other pupils. Mahito’s matrilineal heritage includes the tower.
The family’s elderly servants, by contrast, are comically short of and pleased by even the most basic pleasures like canned goods and tobacco, and Mahito learns to use his position to extract favours through bartering with them. However, their lowly position paradoxically places them in a position of great importance. They are at the heart of an economy of care, dutifully watching over Mahito during his convalescence, and continuing to protect him after he has entered the tower. Their protective role is augmented by their age and length of service, which makes them privy to knowledge about Natsuko’s family and the tower and their histories.
The economy of care is integral to the (literal) reproduction of the social order, for as well as Mahito, the maids also carefully guard Natsuko as she suffers with complications from her pregnancy, performing their own necessary labour to ensure the survival of the generation that will inherit the assets and social position of their employers. The fetishizing and guarding of Natsuko’s pregnancy takes on horrific dimensions within the tower itself, perhaps demonstrative of the centrality of natalist obsessions to fascism.
Fate and time
The tower’s promise is that of a dimension outside of temporality. It is seemingly beyond the finitude of the lifecycle, for the dead and the unborn both reside there. It is a nexus between different times, and offers the possibility that past tragedies might be avoided, that past mistakes might not be repeated, that one can step beyond this world and from there make it anew.
However, what I took as the key message about time in The Boy and the Heron is its circularity. Humankind responds to tragedy by seeking to replicate that which it has lost, and thus both misrecognises and perpetuates the past in the present. Shoichi’s wife dies, and so he marries and has another child by her younger sister. For Mahito, reviving his mother seems to become conflated with saving Natsuko.
Moreover, before he has stepped into the tower, Mahito is already too marked by the violence of the world to not recreate it. The lesson he is subsequently presented with is that maturity and perhaps even contentment are reconciliation with one’s fate. Yet we might also ask ourselves whether, with this fatalism, also comes the inevitable circularity of violence too.
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For an overview of fascism in Japan, see Rikki Kersten, ‘Japan’, in R. J. B. Bosworth (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 526–544.