The Boy and the Heron
Brendan Hodges

Review by Brendan Hodges

The Boy and the Heron 2023

★★★★½

Watched 15 Oct 2023

Miyazaki's latest, another temporary goodbye, is a moving, mad and wondrous lesson on the kingdoms we create and how to let them go, bursting out with some of the most spectacular, soul-stirring imagery I've ever seen. It's both the melancholic elegy of an aging master and shimmering children's fable, meditating on death, life and art, and like The Fabelmans, how they intermix.

I'll speak nothing of the story ~~ go in blind ~~ but through an adventure that's both humble and epic, full of wonder and horror (it's Miyazaki's most grim, brutal movie since Princess Mononoke) the gamut of classic Ghibli themes emerge, a summation and deepening of what came before; the temptation of violence, the joy of creation, salvation through friendship, the unwavering importance of small things, cleansing through love and nature, and our self-destructive march towards apocalypse.

It's Miyazaki's most demanding and achingly personal film, with an opaque and slippery plot beholden to no logic but its own. It's another masterpiece.

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