Today Hayao Miyazaki blows out 85 candles and the web is filled with posts, tributes and drawings dedicated to his magical universe. On the occasion of the Japanese master of animation’s birthday, Rai 3 offers the first screening of “The Boy and the Heron”, a profound and necessary masterpiece, with which the co-founder of Studio Ghibli won the third Oscar of his career.
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The plot of Miyazaki’s latest masterpiece
The story is set in Tokyo in the final years of World War II. Mahito loses his mother during a bombing and finds himself living a new normality after his father’s marriage to Natsuko, sister of the missing woman. The move to a large country estate marks a clear break with the past. In this isolated space, the boy meets a disturbing heron who leads him towards an abandoned tower, the gateway to a parallel world populated by ambiguous and often threatening figures. Mahito’s journey develops as a journey of crossing, rather than of conquest, in which every encounter calls his certainties into question.
A melancholic fairy tale about grief and emotional chaos
The film works on multiple levels. On the surface it is a fantastic story, but at the center there is the process of mourning and the forced passage from childhood to premature maturity. Miyazaki avoids consolatory solutions: the pain is not erased, but integrated. It is a work that talks about loss, responsibility and choice and which can be edgy at times.
The alternate world is not a refuge, but rather an unstable place that reflects the protagonist’s emotional chaos. Even the relationship between good and evil remains deliberately blurred, with characters who don’t allow themselves to be pigeonholed and choices that always involve a loss. The staging, made up of silences, waits and images full of meaning, requires the spectator to play an active role.
The Oscar-winning film that marks the return of the master
The film marks Miyazaki’s return after announcing his retirement in 2013, a farewell that proved impossible for an auteur incapable of stopping creating. At 83, the director has returned driven by an irresistible call to art and imagination. And “The Boy and the Heron” earned him his third Oscar, once again confirming his status as the absolute master of animated cinema.
