The Boy and the Heron (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka)

 

Hayao Miyazaki at work

THE BOY AND THE HERON (Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka)             B                                    Japan  (124 mi)  2023  d: Hayao Miyazaki

Aging directors are a prominent theme of the day, with recently released films by Martin Scorsese at age 81, Ridley Scott at age 86, Ken Loach at age 87, to which we can add Hayao Miyazaki at age 83.  It’s an interesting phenomenon, as these old guard directors have in many ways defined their respective generations, setting the standard for others to follow.  In the world of Japanese animation, Miyazaki literally has no peers, standing out as the last of the hand-drawn animators who painstakingly construct each shot in a cinematic universe that has otherwise been taken over by computer generated imagery, like Disney (Disney's Computer Animated Movies) and Pixar (List of Pixar films), where their shift from hand-drawn animation to CGI animated films has led to their skyrocketing box office success, where FROZEN (2013) became the first Disney animated film to gross $1 billion at the box office, while for Pixar it was TOY STORY 3 (2010), which actually features Miyazaki’s Totoro as a character.  While that’s what kids in America are drawn to today, there is really no one else in the entire universe of film like Miyazaki, a living legend and beloved visionary in a category by himself, standing at the apex in the world of animation, which never gets the same credit as live-action film, yet animation is cinema, and the depth of Miyazaki’s artwork has no peers, described by Guillermo del Toro as working on the same level of artistry as Mozart and Van Gogh. Already destined for immortality, films like this simply aren’t being made anymore, though occasionally the director seamlessly blends computer-generated imagery into his own works (water, for example).  Co-founder of Studio Ghibli in 1985, now entering the seventh decade of his career, Miyazaki is a revered, one-of-a-kind artist whose brilliant aesthetic mixes perfectly composed craftsmanship with recurring themes of humanity, introducing a striking maturity for young viewers, where simplicity is combined with the profound.  Renowned for telling stories about resourceful children navigating their way through tragedy and adversity, merging the fable-like inspiration with characters placed in realistic and historically well-defined contexts, Miyazaki leaves a lasting legacy for future generations, yet because of the exacting standards he sets for himself and his studio staff, Studio Ghibli has been unable to find a worthy successor.  Making his first film since The Wind Rises (Kaze Tachinu) (2014), a fictionalized homage to aeronautical engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Zero fighter plane, the Japanese title of this new film references the 1937 novel How Do You Live? by Genzaburō Yoshino, initially published as a series for young people, becoming a defining coming-of-age book of the postwar generation emphasizing spiritual growth, coming at a time when society rewarded boastfulness, unlimited confidence, and self-promotion over integrity, kindness, and simplicity, turning into a morality tale that suggests viewing oneself at the center of the world is a mistake, encouraging young adults to think about what lies beyond themselves as they strike out on their own.  The book was given to a young Miyazaki by his mother, having a profound influence on his life, mixing elements of his own autobiography into the dreamlike story, which is not an adaptation of the book, instead turning this into a fantasy adventure that draws inspiration from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, yet also feels like a child’s version of Homer’s The Odyssey, with a young child entering a magical world fraught with a series of inherent dangers, yet also filled with unparalleled beauty and seemingly unfathomable mysteries before returning safely home to his family.  

Set in 1943, the penultimate year of the Pacific War, as the 12-year old protagonist, Mahito Maki, is modeled after Miyazaki’s childhood, losing his mother Hisako who is killed in a hospital fire during the hectic opening moments as air-raid sirens pierce the night in the firebombing of Tokyo, where people appear as ghostly phantoms, a blur of fear and fire compounding a feeling of helpless chaos as Mahito frantically races through a panicked crowd to try and reach her.  A year later Mahito’s father Shoichi remarries his wife’s younger sister Natsuko, and similar to Miyazaki's father, owns an air munitions factory that manufactures fighter plane components for the Japanese Imperial Army, with the family evacuating from the city in order to avoid the relentless American bombing campaign, moving to his bride’s more peaceful countryside estate, where they live with several old maids.  Suffering from inconsolable grief afterwards, the transition is particularly hard on Mahito, finding it difficult to accept his stepmother, where an incident of bullying at his school reveals a rigid class system, where most of his classmates come from unassuming farming families who resent the upper class city kid, which leads Mahito to injure himself to avoid having to return, and during his convalescence he discovers Yoshino’s book with an inscription from his mother, who never got a chance to give it to him.  Encountering a gray heron that seems to be taunting him, it lures him down a rabbit hole at an overgrown, abandoned tower that seems steeped with mystery, supposedly built by a man who amusingly “read too many books and went insane.”  Warned not to approach, as it’s dangerously dilapidated, with no upkeep whatsoever, his curiosity gets the best of him, as the heron claims his mother is still alive and only entering the tower can save her.  Hesitant at first, refusing to believe what he hears, suspecting it’s a trap, Natsuko, who is pregnant, inexplicably disappears into the tower one day, so he enters with one of the old maids to save her, but they quickly find themselves caught in an alternate universe where the heron can actually speak, discovering he is actually a small man inhabiting the heron’s body, who somewhat reluctantly ends up serving as his guide throughout this strange netherworld that seems to abide by its own rules, at times feeling more like a nightmare.  Grappling with inner conflicts and insecurities, Miyazaki emphasizes the transformative power of overcoming personal challenges, drawing a distinction between the film and Yoshino’s novel, yet both share an existential theme of finding yourself at a moral crossroads, forced to make decisions as you mature, learning certain things in life which can only be understood through experience, essentially revealing how individuals navigate and come to terms with a world characterized by strife and loss, conveying resilience in the face of conflict and grief, offering viewers a choice between emulating the chaos of Japan’s warring past or forging a different path, with an underlying theme of spiritual growth, rebirth, and personal transformation.  For some viewers the life cycles may bear similarities to Kim Ki-duk’s SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER…AND SPRING (2003), with its Buddhist themes of reincarnation, but the film’s center of gravity is more driven by humanist themes.

Nearly all of Miyazaki’s films confront mortality in some form or another, a suffering at the disappearance of loved ones, yet this may be his grimmest effort, a film laden with death and darkness, a metaphor for the war years, where it’s impossible to understand what happens in the aftermath of such great loss, where only Japan has endured the mass annihilation and radioactive aftereffects from the atomic bomb.  Mahito struggles to adjust to his new life, as he’s just a grieving boy who’s trying to process the inexplicable cruelty of life, leaving him angry and prone to acts of violence, as he’s someone who wants to retreat from reality, sadly wanting nothing more to do with it.  But the gray heron won’t let him do that as it continues to pester him, luring him into a fantasy realm filled with ghosts of the past, where death is a more prominent theme, like Charon’s voyage in the mythological underworld of the dead, featuring glimpses of starry skies, ghost ships, treacherous seas that no longer produce fish, ravenous pelicans, an army of human-sized, man-eating parakeets, and powerful wizards.  Much of this doesn’t make sense, feeling more abstract and funereal, finding themselves on the precipice of the apocalypse, often feeling flawed and unfair, yet he has to figure it out with the help from friends he meets along the way, including Kiriko, a swashbuckling sailor who is a younger version of an old maid at the estate, Himi, a young fire spirit who is Mahito’s biological mother as a child, while Natsuko is her younger sister who has hidden away somewhere to give birth, the Warawara, or bubble spirits that surface to be born in Mahito’s world, and Natsuko’s great-uncle, who rules over the world as a wily old wizard with great powers.  While this may not be as transcendent or aesthetically pleasing as some of the best Miyazaki films, featuring a more tormented and problematic character than in the past, the tone appears harsher, more gloomy and melancholy, especially the blood-stained, self-inflicted injury, which is a gruesome sight, yet the probing gravity of such weighty material is nothing less than inspired, as one can feel overwhelmed by the sheer range of artistic ideas on display, beautifully complimented by a moving score from Miyazaki’s longtime musical composer, Joe Hisaishi, The Boy and The Heron Piano OST | New Ghibli Film Soundtrack YouTube (19:15), adding luscious textures and a melodic connection to what we’re witnessing, all part of the beauty of the imagination.  This also feels like A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, as the autobiographical and deeply personal nature of the film seems to relate to the development of a young artistic mind, where the apocalyptic nature of the subject matter gives way to the power of making art, which is at the core of an artist’s existence, yet art and imagination are not substitutes for reality, but tools to learn how to live, and how to deal with death, becoming an emotional journey about letting go of despair and coming to grips with personal tragedy.  Like Hamlet’s perplexing question on the meaning of life, Miyazaki searches for answers in Yoshino’s novel, as Mahito discovers introspection and learns to overcome his personal resentments and embrace hope and optimism, ultimately finding healing and acceptance with his new family.  Like so many other Miyazaki films, sensing the needs of others seems to awaken the very soul of the young protagonist, where learning to make sense of a confusing world is a hurdle we all must face growing up.  Loss and grief are a part of everyone’s life, yet that is no excuse to pull away and avoid contact with the ones who care about you, as being connected to other people and the world around you may at times seem daunting, but it’s an essential part of living. 

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time

family home in Indianapolis

Weide and Vonnegut

Weide and Vonnegut

Kurt, Bernard, and Allie (left to right) with parents

Vonnegut as a child

Allie, Bernard, and Kurt

Allie and Kurt

 

Kurt and Bernard

Kurt and Jane

love letter just 2 months after marriage

Kurt and Jane

first published article

drawn decorations on door

Kurt and Jane with their three children

the nephews, Allie's four sons

Vonnegut wall mural in Indianapolis

Kurt and Bernard on a train

Vonnegut with Weide

Kurt Vonnegut

writer/co-director Robert B. Weide

Weide in room of Vonnegut drawings

Weide and co-director Don Argott

Vonnegut and Weide

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KURT VONNEGUT: UNSTUCK IN TIME            B+                                                               USA  (127 mi)  2021  d: Robert B. Weide and Don Argott

If you want to really hurt your parents, and you don’t have the nerve to be gay, the least you can do is go into the arts.                             —Kurt Vonnegut

Having directed and/or produced biographies of some of his favorite comedians, the Marx Brothers, W.C. Fields, Woody Allen, and Lenny Bruce, though perhaps best known for winning an Emmy for Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO, Robert B. Weide, listed as writer, co-director, and producer, introduces this film by apologizing for appearing onscreen, basically explaining his own difficulties in taking forty years to make this film, yet it was his lifelong friendship with Vonnegut that actually sets the tone for the film.  Interjecting himself into the film isn’t initially troublesome, but as it continues throughout, told from a first person perspective, almost exclusively seen through the director’s own eyes, one starts questioning the reliability of his skewed narration, particularly when he unequivocally asserts Vonnegut is the best living writer of the 20th century, something that might easily be challenged, as Toni Morrison and her Nobel prize comes to mind, 2019 Top Ten List #9 Toni Morrison: The People I Am, though certainly he is among the most unique literary voices, one of the few writers where every one of their books remains in print.  And while there is a co-director, he is neither acknowledged nor recognized anywhere in the film except the credits sequence.  Nonetheless, this is a labor of love, as Weide starting working on the film in 1988 with a promise to Vonnegut that he had a hard time keeping, never able to complete the film during his lifetime, released 15-years after his death, providing a definitive account of the author’s life, while also documenting his evolving friendship with Vonnegut, who sent him archival material throughout his life, including many phone calls, voicemail messages, and letters, including a treasure trove of previously unreleased footage, where the basis of their lifelong friendship actually becomes the storyline of the film, interjecting the personal with a subjective account of the novelist’s life, spending much of the time exploring the process of making this film.  Heavily influenced by Vonnegut since high school, where a teacher’s recommendation to read the darkly comical Breakfast of Champions made him completely obsessed with the man, as no one was better at articulating the chaotic absurdities of the 70’s, where it became his mission to embrace Vonnegut’s vision.  As a young man in his early 20’s, he reached out to him in 1982 by writing a letter expressing an interest in making a film about him, and much to his surprise Vonnegut actually responded, becoming his favorite author for life, not only his mentor but eventually a friend, spending much of their lives collecting material to make a film, but perhaps the friendship got in the way, becoming too close to the subject, where intruding cameras felt unnecessary and even disrespectful, yet it was the vehicle that held them together for the entire life of the novelist.  Extremely popular by students and young people who lined up in droves at book signings, struck by his rebellious tone of subversive absurdity and anti-authoritarianism, Vonnegut was viewed by some as the voice of the 20th century, much like Mark Twain of the 19th century (Vonnegut considered him an American saint), where his anti-war message particularly resonated during the Vietnam War, along with darkly autobiographical satire that occasionally veers into science-fiction and surrealism, while cartoonish drawings help illustrate his train of thought, using humor as a means to address more serious subject matter.  He was captured by the Nazi’s in Dresden along with hundreds of other American soldiers in WWII, with Vonnegut pointing out the absurdity of nations sending kids off to war, “The second world war was fought by children.  The movies give the impression that war is fought by middle-aged men.  It’s startling how young soldiers are,” only to be contaminated and traumatized by the gruesomeness of the experience, forever reliving the flashbacks, finding it impossible to talk about during their lifetimes.  Vonnegut ended up despising war, asserting those who hated war the most were the ones who fought on the front lines.  Conceiving a fractured narrative that actually involves time travel, he writes in his seminal work Slaughterhouse-Five:      

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.  Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.  He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941.  He’s gone back through that door to find himself in 1963.  He’s seen his birth and his death many times he says.  He pays random visits to all the events in between, and the trips aren’t necessarily fun.

Spending little time actually evaluating his work, this isn’t that kind of film, with Weide leaving that for others, instead it’s more an appreciation of the man himself, profoundly affected by his acerbic wit and gallows humor, his stubborn sense of injustice, and near maniacal demand for fairness, though the film clearly unveils a gloomy underside, as Vonnegut was no stranger to loneliness, chain-smoking, and a gut-wrenching alienation.  Weide instead provides personal details about his unconventional life, using a combination of home movies, constructed animated sequences that resemble his signature style, writers and friends in the publishing field, voiceovers read from his novels, some by Vonnegut himself and others by Sam Waterston, interviews with his three children Nanette, Edith, and Mark, and four nephews, also various biographers (Jerome Klinkowitz, Gregory Sumner, Ginger Strand and Rodney Allen), with frequent interjections by the director himself, creating a portrait of the man from early childhood, providing a glimpse of where it began, what happened in between, and where it ended.  Vonnegut grew up in one of the wealthiest families in Indianapolis, Indiana, that, to a large extent, helped build the city, with architects, a brewery, and a successful hardware store, but they lost their family fortune during the Great Depression, taking a toll on his parents, particularly their mother, who suffered from depression, eventually taking her own life, forcing them to move out of their stately home built by his architect father just for them, where the family handprints embedded into cement still remain.  The youngest of three children, Vonnegut claimed the youngest always has to resort to humor in order to get attention, growing particularly close to his older sister Allie, five years older, who provided the affection and emotional nourishment missing from his mother, going everywhere together, as she always looked after him.  Jumping back and forth in time, paying homage to his most famous literary work, the film plays out like a fractured memory with no conventional structure, feeling more abstract, yet it is massively researched, making his life difficult to film, as according to Vonnegut, “anything that is any good of mine is on a printed page.”  Weide is the perfect vehicle to channel Vonnegut’s life and cultural significance, as his affection for the man is felt in every frame of the film, feeling more like a heartfelt tribute to his life, a living testimonial to the kind of man and artist he would become, combining social criticism, black humor, and a call to basic human decency.  Success did not come easy, forced to take a job provided by his world-renowned atmospheric physicist brother Bernard (eight years older) doing corporate public relations work in the research division for General Electric, where he was privy to the latest scientific developments, some of which managed to reappear in Cat’s Cradle.  Becoming less enamored with science, growing more and more disgusted by the inhumanity of its effects, they moved to Barnstable, Massachusetts to become a full-time writer, where he started writing short stories, greatly encouraged by his wife Jane, who remained one of his biggest lifelong supporters, writing personalized letters back to publishing houses from the piles of rejection notices he received indicating why they were wrong, leading to his first published story, Report On the Barnhouse Effect, appearing in Collier’s magazine in 1950.  He quickly discovered that writing short stories was much more lucrative financially than writing novels, which can take a year or more to write, developing an unadorned writing style that he could churn out at a faster rate.  Short stories were the television of the era, delivered by mail to American households on a regular basis through magazines, also available at libraries, though it was television that eventually drove the short story market into oblivion.  Nonetheless, he wrote his first novel, Player Piano, which was published in 1952.  Vonnegut wrote briefly for Sports Illustrated, fired after a single article, and even managed a Saab dealership in Massachusetts, the first in the country, but used the building primarily as an office, having little interest in selling cars.  More than anything, what this film reveals is that time spent with this man, as Weide does, is invaluable, like a preserved time capsule.     

Eschewing anything resembling objectivity, bordering at times on self-indulgence (Vonnegut was himself self-indulgent), their lives merged and intersected through an increasingly close 25-year friendship, often seen chatting together, eventually taking center stage in the film, “He thinks what I think about the world,” gaining a unique vantage point of intimacy.  Given full access to the life of an iconic figure, this is mostly a love fest with rare moments of poignancy that can be extremely moving, eliciting genuine warmth, though it does include the artist in his best and worst moments.  Just a month after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he married Jane Marie Cox in a Quaker ceremony on the backyard terrace of Jane’s house in Indianapolis, with Allie as the maid of honor, honeymooning at French Lick Resort on the edge of the Hoosier National Forest, with Jane making him read her favorite novel The Brothers Karamazov on their honeymoon.  A decade later, he lost his sister prematurely to cancer, viewed as his guardian angel, contending Allie was the one person he always wrote for, becoming his exclusive target audience, adding her four children to his own, as her husband also died in a tragic railway bridge accident just days before her death.  These kids describe the seemingly unlimited joy and freedom they had wreaking havoc, like a marauding gang of hellraisers, pretty much left alone, turning Vonnegut’s life into chaos, subject to drastic mood swings, a grumpy and inattentive father, belligerently yelling at them to shut up when he was working, making everyone afraid of him, yet also growing elated after a successful day of writing, showing a relaxed and more playful side.  He ascended to overnight celebrity status with the massive success of Slaughterhouse-Five, a book that he painstakingly worked on following his war experiences, described as his Dresden novel, taking nearly 25-years to write, initially thinking it would be easy recounting what he saw, instead writing draft after draft until he finally got it right, where the money that had previously eluded him all his life suddenly poured in by the bucketloads.  Unfortunately, even for a Midwesterner like Vonnegut, success can go to one’s head, breaking up with his long-supportive wife Jane as he moved from his Cape Cod residence to New York, leaving her for Jill Krementz, nearly twenty years younger, a photojournalist who spent a year working in Vietnam, meeting while working on a photographic series about writers in the early 1970’s, eventually publishing 31 books of her own.  For such a quirky and inventive writer who challenges the norms, this couldn’t be more typical male chauvinist behavior in a midlife crisis, hoping for salvation by discarding the old and finding something new.  His kids, of course, were devastated, mostly feeling cruelly abandoned, having no words to describe what this did to their mother, who once thought she’d be a writer too, quickly recognizing her husband’s tremendous talent even before he did, sacrificing her own dreams and ambitions in order to help him (How Jane Vonnegut Made Kurt Vonnegut a Writer), making their divorce all the more heartbreaking.  Vonnegut had a difficult time living up to expectations after having such considerable success, as writing a follow-up work was a painful struggle, splitting his time between numerous anti-war rallies, college commencement addresses around the country, and also teaching a Harvard University course on creative writing.  While his personal life was disintegrating, facing his own issues with depression, critics lambasted his next novel with a scathing rebuke, unleashing a wave of criticism they may have held in reserve for years, claiming it lacked substance, exhibited a lack of fully realized female characters, with no racial diversity whatsoever.  In much of his work Vonnegut’s own voice is apparent, yet occasionally it is filtered through the literary alter-ego of a recurring character, science-fiction author Kilgore Trout (based on science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon), characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism about the human condition.  In a career spanning over 50 years, he published fourteen novels, three short-story collections, five plays, and five nonfiction works before he died at the age of 84 from brain injuries in 2007, a result of falling and hitting his head.  Often derided and overlooked in intellectual circles and print reviews, as humor is never taken seriously, yet Vonnegut was able to incorporate it in unique ways, offering a sly commentary on the times we’re living in, conjuring up characters and places from his imagination that felt strangely different, where the irreverence of his breezy style recalled J. D. Salinger from the 50’s, writers that served in the war, deeply affected by the experience, but distinguished themselves afterwards by appealing to the alienation of youth with edgy, offbeat humor and biting sarcasm that set them apart by making literature fun to read, offering a kind of iconoclastic wisdom.