Spread it or ignore it?

For my dollar and a half, budgies do The Boy and the Heron (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), even more than the mad heron itself. Such are the delightful and strange surprises that Studio Ghibli founder Hayao Miyazaki builds into his films, and this one, apparently, but perhaps not his last (I think the same was said of his last one, from 2013). The wind picks up). As usual, the film is meticulously hand-drawn and a return to absolute fantasy form for Miyazaki, albeit with enough fresh surreal touches and deep poignance to make it both a nod to his greatest past works and a genuine adventure. The master director/animator, now 83, has been rewarded with an Oscar, a BAFTA, nearly $300 million in worldwide box office receipts and, as this review confirms, a major critical success.

The essential: Air raid sirens. Bombs killed his mother, burned her alive in a hospital, and forced him to leave his home. Mahito (Luca Padovan) is 11 and he shouldn’t be going through this. There’s no excuse for his suffering. “Three years into the war, my mother died,” he says. “A year later, my father and I left Tokyo.” They find themselves in a big old house in the countryside, and Natsuko (Gemma Chan) looks just like his mother, and for a reason: she’s his mother’s sister. She introduces herself to Mahito as his “new mother.” And she’s pregnant. It’s a lot to take in for an 11-year-old.

At least Natsuko is kind and willing. Mahito’s new life provides him with everything he’ll ever need, as does his father Shoichi (Christian Bale), whose factory is so close you can see it from the steps. (Shoichi owns it, building planes for the war effort. Yes, they can afford a lot of things with that business.) Mahito has his own room, a vast estate to explore inside and out, a staff of servants at his disposal. That’s where it gets, well, odd. Seven grannies bustle around him and they are small and eccentric like the dwarf compadres from Snow White. An unusually aggressive heron seems to be stalking him, peering from the pond, peering out the window, landing on the ledge and shitting and squawking. And a silo tower stands on the land, its entrance blocked by debris. He follows the heron’s molted feathers into the tower and retrieves them, but Mahito is unable to fit through a narrow crevice. Natsuko tells the story of the tower: her great-uncle built it, filled it with books, went crazy, and disappeared, never to be seen again. It seems like a myth.

Mahito regularly dreams of trying and failing to save his mother from the flames. He goes to school and is a rich kid, an object of scowls and fists; on the way home, Mahito hits himself on the side of the head with a rock and walks home, blood streaming from the wound. He spots the heron in the pond and approaches. “I’ll guide you to your mother,” he says as a chorus of fish tails rises from the water and echoes him and a legion of frogs swarms all over Mahito, suffocating him. He passes out. When he wakes, he makes a bow and arrow to ward off the heron menace. The arrow doesn’t fly straight, so he affixes the heron’s feathers as fletching. Shortly after, Natsuko wanders into the forest. She was suffering from her pregnancy and now she’s gone. Mahito follows his path and follows the transitions of dream logic in a world that makes no logical sense, and the giant, goose-stepping, human-eating parakeets aren’t even the half of it.

What films will this remind you of? : Bizarre dreams, near-doubles, a narrative set in an insane amount of time: Miyazaki’s work has always been extremely creative, but it’s never been so, you know, David Lynch Before. Think Twin Peaks Or Mulholland Drive if the edge was more fanciful than horrific. And lively, of course.

Must-see performances: It took Miyazaki and his animators years – years – to hand-draw every cell of this film. that.

Memorable dialogues: “Your presence is required!” – the heron’s mantra

Sex and skin: None.

Our opinion : The story of a child who escapes the difficulties of real life by letting his imagination run wild and going on a spiritual journey is nothing new to Miyazaki, Ghibli or anyone, it seems. The Boy and the Heron The film is special, almost monumental, because it is an explosion of creativity from the life of the filmmaker himself: from the residual feelings of his family driven from urban to rural areas by the Second World War, from their wealth due to the industry of their father (essentially a war profiteer), his bond with his mother (who lived to the age of 72, the film’s starting point). He takes his specific experiences and broadens them to a universal idea: how do children cope with loss, with tragedy, with the grotesqueries of war, with all those things much bigger than themselves? It’s a shock to young minds who are still learning the fundamentals of selflessness.

As is inevitably the case with the best stories, the film feels emotionally accessible while also being deeply personal to its creator—who, as you probably know, has channeled the vast palette of his emotional life into a myriad of films that have touched so many people so deeply. For me, it’s My Neighbor Totoro, Taken away as if by magic And Ponyoand I feel that, through a simple interpretation of the images, I wanted references to them to exist in The boy and the heron:The mysterious path in the woods that Mahito follows seems like an explicit interpretation of the path to the sleeping forest spirit Totoro; the spirits that Mahito sees rowing in the waters are black, almost cosmic beings like the beings in the public baths in Taken away as if by magic; at one point, Mahito sails into an angry sea like the one Ponyo merges with.

Perhaps these are specific reminders that Miyazaki inserted intentionally, the act of a man looking back at his youth and, in the unreality outside of time and space devoid of logic that Mahito visits, viewing his creations from past films as the product of fruitful dreams. (The director takes the time to show Mahito’s feet from time to time in close-up, on dry land, as if to play with us before making the character’s reality indelibly liquid. As always, Miyazaki’s eye for this kind of detail is sharp; there are no throwaway shots here.) One could also write a master’s thesis on Miyazaki’s many grandmothers throughout his filmography – they are always nurturing in some way , authoritative and in touch with the ethereal, and always depicted with strange faces dotted with warts and moles, their large bulging eyes, often pointed in opposite directions, the distortions of a child’s point of view.

In these old women, and many other elements of The boy and the heron – my God, the pelicans and the frogs and that heron, which seems to have a strange, strange man living in its belly, they are all marvels – there is strangeness and seriousness and comedy and danger and magnificent pathos, emotions and impressions that never hold together clearly, but blend together like the fabric of life. I was particularly moved by the scenes in which Mahito called upon bravery from somewhere deep within him, not for his nascent courage, but because I couldn’t help but wonder if Miyazaki was doing the same thing with this beautiful, sad, bizarre and, above all, this, life-affirming film.

Our call: East The boy and the heron another Miyazaki masterpiece? I think so. Stream it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.