One Present Thing:
Kyle Chayka: Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron is exactly the kind of film that you want to see in a movie theater over the holidays. It’s utterly immersive for two hours, completely transporting, and family friendly (PG-13, for disturbing political allegories and creepy animals). It helps if you’ve seen the rest of the Ghibli oeuvre but it’s not totally necessary. The film sweeps you away into its world, which only gets bigger and weirder as time goes on. There’s a reason it was first released in Japan with zero press and zero plot description. Partly, it’s indescribable, and partly, it’s much better if you just go with the flow without expectations, like a mushroom trip or Tarkovsky’s film Stalker.
Animation often suffers under the stigma of childishness. And yet The Boy and the Heron is riskier, more adult art than most of what the American film industry produces. Circa WWII, Mahito, the young protagonist, loses his mother and is whisked away from Tokyo by his father to the countryside airplane factory he owns, where the boy’s new stepmother awaits. But at the old family mansion, a strange heron begins to bother the boy, beckoning him toward a mysterious tower built by an ancestor. This is the plot in the same way that the plot of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is “a man loses his cat.”
The film has the aura of “late work” that art historians associate with certain painters. Velazquez, De Kooning, Picasso — they all became more abstract, more committed, more intuitive at the end of their careers. Director Hayao Miyazaki feels like that here: You can see him flashing by tropes that he has established over decades, bringing up the vast human questions he has explored before, stretching farther to the breaking point of unspoken meaning. Fantastical worlds emerge only to crumble. Mysterious rituals are hinted at and then quickly left behind. Strange but delicious food is cooked. Everyone has met in past or future lives. You can’t say exactly what The Boy and the Heron is trying to tell you, and to pin it down to a message would be a crime. Like all great art, to quote Donald Judd, “It simply exists.” (For a great discussion of its themes, listen to The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast episode.)
Since when did most art become so unambitious? The film is about being a child, being a parent, creativity, responsibility, moral ambiguity, generational continuity, mad geniuses, the weak points of monsters, the pointlessness of war. And there are funny little critters. Don’t say we can’t have it all.
One Past Thing
Nate Gallant: Hayao Miyazaki’s films are dreamlike — but not the uncanny dream-time of David Lynch or the philosophical daydream of Agnes Varda. They contain a kernel of history's melancholia, particularly in The Boy and the Heron. The script was based on a 1937 novel by Gensaburō Yoshino, How Do You Live? which makes a brief appearance in the film: Mahito’s late mother leaves him a copy of the book. It was published as part of a progressive Japanese publisher's series for children, which advocated against the rising tide of militant nationalism, by then already in full swing. We know how things ended up. Perhaps some high schoolers learned about ethics, but the book was banned. Japan, which had already built a full-scale regime of settler-colonialism on Taiwan and Korea, was then intensifying efforts to brutally silence criticism at home and preparing for a full-scale invasion of Manchuria in 1939.
For some intellectual historical context from someone who lived through many critical moments of this period, and in fact edited a volume of essays on democracy and peace by Yoshino, take a look at Shunsuke Tsurumi's An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, or his Cultural History of Postwar Japan. If you ask a scholar of modern Japanese history, these studies have been surpassed many times over by theorists of fascisms and imperialisms in East Asia. However, recalling Tsurumi's first-hand testament and philosophical perspective is, I think, worth doing when thinking about Japan and the US today.
Tsurumi, born in Japan but sent to boarding school in Massachusetts, ended up a student of W.V. Quine in the Department of Philosophy at Harvard. He studied there until 1942, when he was forced into an internment camp along with more than 100,000 Americans of Japanese descent and Japanese citizens living in the US. He finished his degree while imprisoned at Fort Meade in Maryland that year, and was eventually deported to Japan. After the war, he became known for his ardent activism against Japan's latent militarism, its political extortion through post-war treaties with the United States, and the use of police intervention on student protests at college campuses. His life is an integral part of the intimate but troubled relationship between Japan and the US that we inherit today — one that has eventually resulted in The Boy and the Heron becoming the top box-office film in the country.
I was once told that Tsurumi would shave his head somewhere near the imperial palace every year on the emperor's birthday. The act is freighted with a complicated history of public shame, but I imagine he was protesting the lack of accountability on the part of those associated with the wartime regime in Japan. The shaving represented a taking of responsibility that still has not quite come from the body politic at large in Japan, or the US of its treatment of Japan after the war, no less. His life and thought may be amply historical, but here, too, we find a different kind of dream of the past — no less strange, no less melancholic, no less hopeful of something else to come.