The Boy and the Heron

Having claimed he was finished his animated movie-making career from time to time since 1998’s Princess Mononoke, Hayao Miyazaki has come out of retirement once more. Originally titled in Japan as How Do You Live?, after Miyazaki’s favourite childhood novel by Genzaburo Yoshino, the animated film received its North American debut recently at the Toronto International Film Festival. American distributor GKIDS describes The Boy and the Heron as a “semi-autobiographical fantasy about life, death, and creation, in tribute to friendship,” and explores a space where living and dead beings coexist.

We’re drawn into the world of the movie quickly with a boy running through a Japanese town as an air raid siren blares during World War II. We hear the boy’s panting offscreen shortly before appearing on screen; the sound of the wind as the town erupts in flames is the overwhelming sonic element. It’s all a twelve-second prelude, as we get an audiovisual blackout before 0:14, when we’re introduced to one of this film’s key themes of composer and longtime collaborator Joe Hisaishi (Mamoru Fujisawa)—it’s a plaintive motif for piano and voice, oscillating up and down the beginning of a minor scale. However, at 0:23 we’re thrown a curveball; as the heron swoops by and—coinciding with the director’s title card—the theme modulates down a full step, which creates a darker melodic inflection.

At 0:32 a much fuller orchestral arrangement enters in double time. Small pauses give room for the audioviewer to reflect on what’s happening visually, as we see various fantastical scenes unfold (albeit well within expectations for fans of other films by Studio Ghibli). At 0:39 the arrangement starts to fold against itself, and the notes begin to clash and jar, while the strings become much more agitatedand discordant—almost like a horror film. It matches well with the scenes unfolding—such as discovering a shoulder is made of water, or dozens of frogs crawling over one’s body. (The aforementioned water is disconcertingly loud in the mix, and likely intentionally so.) The focus on wordless choir in the arrangement has a connotation of the fantastical and even spiritual, and given the subject—coexistence of the living and dead—it clearly fits.

What the trailer certainly doesn’t do, especially with its approximately one minute length, is so much as attempt to explain any of the plot. Instead, what’s presented is largely a montage of image, sound, and feeling. Indeed, the new North American title gives the biggest hint regarding plot—that there’s a boy, and a heron that has some significance. In Japan, there were no promotional materials at all for the film—in a recent interview, Miyazaki suggested that “this is what moviegoers latently desire”. It makes sense then that this trailer is so minimal, since what the director really wanted was none at all.

Such restraint may especially work for a trailer of a film like The Boy and the Heron. It’s a film that’s full of wonder, and revealing more plot, even nothing more than the barest of snippets, runs the risk of over-explanation. Similarly, the music lays out a theme and a moment of orchestration, but that’s all. It’s likely to be the best example of “less is more” in a trailer that we have heard and seen this year.

— Curtis Perry