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. 

Apollo 10 1/2: a Space Age Childhood

Writer/director Richard Linklater

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD                 B                                                     USA  (97 mi)  2022  d: Richard Linklater 

You know how memory works, even if he was asleep, he’ll someday think he saw it all.     —Mom (Lee Eddy), to her husband after their son fell asleep during the moon landing 

Few directors understand the thought process of kids better than Austin director Richard Linklater, whose films like Dazed and Confused (1993), 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, or even Everybody Wants Some !! (2016) feel like anthems to childhood, giving audiences a chance to just hang out with a typical ragtag group of kids that may remind you of your own childhood experiences, bringing the musical soundtrack center stage, a remembrance of what we were listening to back in the day.  This, on the other hand, is an animated quasi-autobiographical story about growing up in a suburb just outside of Houston in the late 60’s, where everything revolved around NASA, established in the late 50’s, becoming one of the state’s largest employers with 8000 employees and an annual budget of $100 million.  Today, however, it employs more than 50,000 with a budget closer to $5 billion, ranking #12 on Forbes list of America’s Best Large Employers for 2021 (NASA ranks in top 25 of Forbes 'America's Best Large ... - Chron), with more than a million people each year visiting the Houston Space Center.  The key to this film is the folksy narration by Jack Black (whose mother actually worked for NASA), which comprises the majority of the film, weaving together childhood memories, offering an amusing context of what it was like growing up in a neighborhood surrounded by other NASA families, as living there “was like being where science fiction was coming to life,” yet it’s all told like a bedtime story, or an even younger version of The Wonder Years (1988-93).  It’s extremely rare for an animated movie to also be a period piece, a love letter to a lost era and a rather astonishing memory play, like a diary or scrapbook of the time, yet what distinguishes this film is the clever attention to details, which couldn’t be more accurate to the times it depicts, with Linklater as screenwriter recalling his own nostalgic upbringing, told with an enthusiastically cheerful style, actually conveying a childlike sense of wonder.  Returning to the playful animated style of WAKING LIFE (2001) and A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), comical and often absurd references told through an existential reference point, this film takes us back to a more innocent time, breaking ground in the suburbs, an experimental new style of living that becomes all the rage in America, tract housing for communities that are almost entirely white, offering amusing anecdotes in a playful style, using edgy 60’s music to match the humor, mixing dreamlike reveries into a classical coming-of-age experience that is mostly a delight from start to finish.  Taking us back to 4th grade, in between incidents of severe school punishment, as back in those days it was still all right to paddle kids with brutality, Stan (voiced by Milo Coy), claims it all happened during a dodgeball game, as two men in suits showed up, Bostick (Glen Powell) and Kranz (Zachary Levi), taking him aside to offer him a chance to be an astronaut, as by some happenstance mishap the initial space capsule was built too small, where only a child could fit, so they were impressed by his science reports and his physical fitness, thinking he would make an ideal candidate.  Without thinking too hard he agrees, not realizing what he’s signed up for, as it’s a top secret mission, unable to tell his friends or family, with the mission taking place during summer camp, with NASA providing all the fake photographs sent to his family of his supposed experience in the northern woods of Michigan, but he would actually be going through extensive training for his first space flight to the moon.    

Taking a lengthy aside, we quickly realize this is a film devoted to capturing a place in time, like a modern era version of Our Town (1940), as the narrator proceeds to tell us about his childhood experiences growing up with his family in Texas, where his Dad works for NASA, but doesn’t have one of those sexy or glamorous jobs, much to his son’s chagrin, as that’s all he can think about, being an astronaut, completely surrounded by Astro-dominated themes in local businesses, from hamburger and hot dog shops to bowling alleys to theme parks, including the mammoth Astrodome where they play baseball, the first stadium to play on AstroTurf, with a giant exploding scoreboard that shoots off pistol fire with every home run, the kinds of things that would capture a young boy’s imagination.  The youngest of six siblings, he leads a charmed life, where blacks and hippies seen on the street from their car are gawked at like specimens in a zoo, outsiders that are completely outside their normal experience, where they only hear about them from afar.  The family life revolves around the television, developing peculiar family viewing habits, while recalling all those old 60’s television shows, running home after school to watch Dark Shadows, with Twilight Zone coming on late at night, often falling asleep before the national anthem plays, signing off for the night (unthinkable today with 24/hour marathon television coverage), while on weekends they could check out the sci fi/monster movies playing at the local theater that reflected the paranoia craze from nuclear fall-out with mutant radioactive monsters.  Of course, listening to his sister’s record collection was fun, while setting off fireworks was a big thing in his neighborhood, where there was always a local pyrotechnic setting off rockets, even creating a capsule and putting a live grasshopper inside.  Among their most favorite activities was piling into the back of a pick-up truck, with no regard for personal safety, and heading for the beach in Galveston, with his Dad chugging down beers, which was not against the law at the time, recalling wiping the tar off their feet from oil spill pollution embedded into the sand.  Because the housing development was built on flat land, it tended to flood during heavy rains, causing sewer back-up and standing water, ideal conditions for breeding mosquitos, generating another favorite past-time, riding bikes through the fumes behind the pest control truck spraying DDT insecticide throughout the neighborhood to wipe out a potential mosquito-infestation, knowing nothing at the time about its toxic impact on humans as well.  Yet nothing was more fun than a trip to Astroworld, which was a Texas version of a Disneyland theme park, with scary rides, splash drops, shooting galleries, Double Ferris wheels, an encounter with the Abominable Snowman, and just a million fun things to do, while the accompanying musical soundtrack is simply extraordinary, always a highlight, and one of the most pleasantly rewarding aspects of any Richard Linklater film, APOLLO 10 ½: A SPACE AGE CHILDHOOD - Movie Soundtrack on Spotify.

Tommy Pallotta is the head of animation on all three Linklater animated films, each one using the Max Fleischer rotoscope technique responsible for the Betty Boop and Popeye cartoons, but he uses a somewhat different method here, animating over live-action footage, photographs, or television broadcasts, including the historic Walter Cronkite broadcasts of the Apollo 11 moon mission on live CBS television during the summer of 1969, with astute commentary provided by his sidekick Eric Sevareid, a war correspondent turned television journalist who offered opinion and analysis.  Changing the focus to actual historical events gives the film a more starkly realistic look, with television providing recurring war footage on a daily basis, reminding viewers of the grim body count of tragic American lives lost in Vietnam, also offering views of blacks in Harlem expressing their viewpoint that the millions of dollars spent on a moon landing is wasted, as it could be put to better use by helping poor people in America who were struggling on a daily basis to make ends meet.  With NASA employing less than 4% blacks, and no presence of minorities in their own schools, what’s noteworthy is that from the protected vantage point of the Houston suburbs, those events couldn’t be more distant and alien to their own lives, “confined to television,” as Stan puts it, while the NASA launch was shown in their classrooms at school, with students discussing the significance of space exploration, including suggestions that it may actually become such an everyday occurrence that in a few years people might even be living in outer space, while many felt space would be the great unifier, bringing the world together, perhaps epitomized by the first photo of a blue earth as seen from space.  From a child’s imagination, it’s easy to see how realistic news stories might be tuned out, while dreams of interplanetary space exploration was so much more fascinating, heavily influenced by Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), interjecting Stan’s own space fantasy happening simultaneously to the Apollo mission.  What this suggests is that at least for this generation of kids, they were less concerned about war, poverty, and budget constraints and much more thrilled imagining what it would be like to be an astronaut, which would suddenly be listed high among what they might aspire to be.  Among the more hilarious scenes is watching Stan enthusiastically talk about the sublime qualities of Kubrick’s futuristic film in front of several disinterested friends who couldn’t care less, showing a really good grasp of what the film is about, especially for a ten-year old, considering most adults couldn’t figure it out, clearly suggesting the kid was a budding filmmaker.  A cantankerous grandma offers a humorous counterpoint, a complete opposite from the one who keeps taking them to see THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965) and feeding them treats, as this one feeds them conspiracy theories, like JFK is not really dead, instead he’s a vegetable living on a Greek island owned by Aristotle Onassis, which explains why Jackie married him, or how overpopulation will leave people without sufficient food to eat, leading to mass starvation and famine, while the space race itself led to broad speculation about how nuclear war could devastate the planet, with the duck-and-cover school drills (How 'Duck-and-Cover' Drills Channeled America's Cold War ...) offering a ridiculous defense against toxic radioactivity.  When it comes time for the men to actually walk on the moon, Stan pretty much sleeps through it, exhausted from spending his day at Astroworld, where it seemed to take forever sitting in front of the television to get to that point, continually prolonging the main event with endless talk about things not even shown, described by his sister as “endlessly boring,” though in his own dreams he imagines himself doing his own moon walk, which in the end, seems to be all that really matters.   

Who Are the 12 Men Who Walked on the Moon? - WTTW

In all, 24 American astronauts have made the trip from the earth to the moon between 1968 and 1972.  Three astronauts made the journey from the earth to the moon twice, but only twelve men have actually walked on the moon.  None have been back since December 11, 1972.