Hayao Miyazaki is now 83 years old. A co-founder of the legendary Studio Ghibli of Tokyo, he’s a world-renowned animator with an Oscar on his shelf for Spirited Away. He has officially retired more than once; the last time was in 2013. Japan can be extra thankful he doesn’t seem to understand "retired." With his latest film project, The Boy and the Heron, he has given Japan its first Golden Globe for Best Animated Feature. It’s also the first time this particular Golden Globe category has been given to a non-English, hand-drawn, animated film. 

Drawing on his own childhood, the move of his family to the countryside during the War, and his own memories about his family and growing up, Miyazaki has The Boy and Heron deftly mix fantasy, escapism, and wild imagination as ways of coping with childhood pain and grief. In what has to be now seen as par for the course for Miyazaki, there is no limitation on the weirdness and strange worlds conjured up in the narrative - which was penned by Miyazaki and inspired by (and not an adaptation of) the 1937 novel of Genzaburō Yoshino. 

The central character of Mahito is the young boy we’re introduced to at the start of the film. His mother is ‘killed’ in a 1943 air raid, and upon relocating to a rural area, his father remarries, marrying the sister of his late wife. The father works in a munitions factory. The stepmother/aunt is Natsuko, and after meeting a talking heron, Mahito must go on a quest to find Natsuko in a parallel universe. The gateway to this universe lies in a sinister, abandoned tower on the countryside property. 

If you want an indication of just how revered Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli are and the kind of long shadow it has cast on the careers of several noted directors and film auteurs, it was Guillermo Del Toro who introduced this film when it showed in the Toronto Film Festival in late 2023. There are Japanese and English versions of this film. The screening I caught here in Manila was in Japanese with English subtitles, but I’ve heard very good things about the English version. Two Batmans, Robert Pattinson and Christian Bale, Florence Pugh and Willem Defoe, are among the Hollywood names who lent their voices to the English The Boy and the Heron. 

I mentioned how the animation here was hand-drawn and was thoroughly amazed by the depictions of fire and water in the animation. It’s like you’ll blink and look twice to accept this is all animation and not actual footage of water - I especially appreciate this animation wizardry when we first see the pond where the heron first encounters Mahito. 

From pelicans to parakeets to our anthropomorphic heron, you’ll be amazed by how Miyazaki creates versions of the real world and the parallel universe within the tower and Mahito’s imagination. He even applies the same skewed logic to the grannies living in the country home Mahito ends up in. There’s emotional depth, unbridled imagination, weirdness and strange ideas, realism mixed with fantasy, and a wonderful musical score accentuating the animation's delicacy and grace.

The coda discusses confronting sadness and replacing it with wonder and joy. And in typical Miyazaki fashion, we get his signature abrupt ending. With so much tragedy hounding Japan since the New Year, this is a little ray of sunshine for the country - paltry in the face of human lives lost, but hopefully, it can bring a little joy.