Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron: Film Review

Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is as much an ode to lost collaborators and a confrontation with death as it is a making-of doc to 2023’s The Boy and the Heron.

In no small part due to his age, he’s not the young man he once was, and every new film of his takes many years, seven in the case of The Boy and the Heron. Add onto that the original Japanese title, How Do You Live?, and it was hard not to expect a major new work from Miyazaki that would reflect on the 82 years that had occurred before. The Boy and the Heron did live up to that part; it’s without question his most personal work, something that becomes especially obvious when watching the making-of documentary Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron.

While we can consider ourselves lucky that Hayao Miyazaki is still with us, the same can’t be said about many other vital personalities of Studio Ghibli. Death is what permeates Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron the same way it did The Boy and the Heron. Before we even reach the 20-minute mark, the deaths of three separate people have been addressed, and a funeral scene unfolds, complete with the shivering voice of Miyazaki recounting stories of his old friend and colleague Isao Takahata, or as Miyazaki calls him, Pak-san.

It’s this death in particular that takes up a lot of space in the film, as we follow Miyazaki from the initial shock to a phase of depression in which he can’t get any work done to the eventual catharsis that comes with the acceptance of his death. All of it meaningfully shaped the film that The Boy and the Heron would become.

For the uninitiated, The Boy and the Heron is about a young boy called Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki), who loses his mother in a fire and is subsequently taken to a house in the peaceful countryside to stay with his new mother figure and aunt, Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura). While he’s there, he starts getting harassed by an up-to-no-good Heron (Masaki Suda), who not before long draws Mahito into a magical new world with some rather sinister characteristics. All of it is ruled by the mysterious Granduncle (Shōhei Hino), who himself is starting to lose his strength, and with it, control over this kingdom that transcends life.

Familiarity with the film will certainly increase your appreciation for Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron. Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki remarks that one of Miyazaki’s greatest strengths as an artist is his ability to let fiction and reality bleed into one another, and in here we get to watch it happen, as real life is turned into the abstract plot of The Boy and the Heron. This happens knowingly in part. And so Miyazaki tells us how Granduncle is an embodiment of Takahata, to which Suzuki adds that Mahito seems to be a stand-in for Miyazaki himself, who needs to learn to confront death. But there are many more parallels too that might happen more subconsciously in the creative mind of Miyazaki, and director Kaku Arakawa intends to make sure we don’t miss them.

Kaku Arakawa is primarily known for his documentaries about Miyazaki (2016’s Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki and 2019’s 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki being his last two projects), and given his history and familiarity with the man, he won’t miss any detail. Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron make frequent use of intercutting different footage, new and old, real and fiction. Maybe Miyazaki is reminiscing about his past with someone, and so we get to see footage of them together when they were still alive. Or he makes an observation that he might’ve unknowingly made in a past movie too. But most of all, it’s highlighting the many, many ways in which The Boy and the Heron is a phantasmagoric dreamscape of everything Miyazaki is going through as he and his friends and colleagues are nearing death.

The title Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, unassuming as it might be, already makes a pretty clear statement once you remember that the heron in Miyazaki’s film is a harbinger of death, who circles people like a vulture before bringing them over to the other side. And so this documentary is an ode to lost collaborators and a confrontation with death as much as it is a making-of for The Boy and the Heron. This particular heron is circling in closer and closer on Miyazaki, taking many of his friends and colleagues, just not him (the parallels to 1992’s Porco Rosso, whose protagonist wonders why he simply won’t die, as the deaths of others surrounds him, aren’t lost on Kaku Arakawa).

As a making-of documentary, Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron isn’t particularly concerned with the physicality of the animation process, how a Miyazaki story is structured, or any other technical details. It’s more interested in the creative process as a means of processing your own life and experiences. Unfortunately, in this case, that means coming to terms with the deaths of so many important people that have shaped Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki, both as a person and as a creative, and the films they’ve made together. But even in passing they continued to sculpt the very foundation of Miyazaki’s world. And so they will be remembered in both this documentary and the film it was made about.

Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is now available to watch on digital and on demand.

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