82-year-old Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film, THE BOY AND THE HERON, is a personal, meditative look that hits the same story beats as his previous classics. While the visual style soars, I can’t help but scratch my head after viewing it and ask, what was the point?
Miyazaki is an animation legend. SPIRITED AWAY and PRINCESS MONONOKE remain two of my all-time favorite movie-going experiences. Yet, his style of storytelling and visual approach to a film has not changed in the last several decades. For the most part, THE BOY AND THE HERON feels stuck in the past. It has luscious hand-drawn animation that sometimes makes you forget that any narrative is lacking for the first fifty minutes. The “break into two” moment from the SAVE THE CAT story structure doesn’t happen until the fifty-minute mark! That’s a lot of setup.
While Miyazaki’s films have remained the same, Makoto Shinkai (SUZUME, WEATHERING WITH YOU, and YOUR NAME) has burst onto the scene, reinventing the anime movie style. Shinkai has infused the genre with J-pop and more computer animation to heighten the effects of the hand-drawn images. I would love to see Miyazaki innovate in the later stage of his career and do something similar, but that’s not in the cards for him.
As I write this review, it sounds like I’m being extremely negative about one of my all-time favorite film directors. If I am, it might be because of the expectations of a Miyazaki film and one that has a 97% fresh score on Rotten Tomatoes. There’s still enough good in THE BOY AND THE HERON to recommend seeing it. Even if the protagonist is dull, audiences won’t be bored seeing what fantastical, surprising visual moment comes next.
The movie is available dubbed in theatres in the States. I watched it with subtitles.
