Hayao Miyazaki, back from retirement, sends a grieving boy down a tower into a world of herons, parakeets and spirits. The first hour is as controlled as anything he has made; the second is crowded and given to speeches. We recommend it warmly.
Hayao Miyazaki said he had retired after The Wind Rises, and has come back with a film whose Japanese title is a question: How Do You Live? Mahito Maki (Soma Santoki) is a boy in wartime Tokyo whose mother dies in a hospital fire. His father Shoichi (Takuya Kimura) moves them to the country, to a house belonging to Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura), his late wife’s younger sister, who is pregnant and is to be Mahito’s new mother. There is a sealed tower in the grounds, a staff of bent old maids, and a grey heron (Masaki Suda) that will not leave the boy alone. The first hour is Miyazaki at his most disciplined; the second is too full and keeps stopping to explain itself. We recommend it warmly, and with that caveat.
The fire is the first thing you see, and it is why the film carries a 12A. Mahito runs through the streets towards the hospital, and the crowd and the flames are drawn as smears, as though the paint were still wet, so that people melt into sparks and the boy’s own outline breaks up as he pushes through them. There is almost no music. We were shaken, and it took us a while to work out why: the picture itself seems to be burning, and the boy is inside it.
Then the country, and the quietest hour Miyazaki has made. Mahito says almost nothing and lies on his bed. Atsushi Okui keeps the house in soft greens and clean, hard daylight. After a fight on his first day at the new school, the boy picks up a stone on the walk home and strikes his own head with it. The blood is drawn thick and dark, and we flinched. It is the first thing he does of his own accord, and the film does not comment on it.
Suda’s heron is a fine piece of grotesquerie. It wheedles and gargles, taunts the boy with his dead mother, and when it opens its beak there is a man’s face inside with a full set of teeth. Then Natsuko walks into the woods and does not come back, and Mahito follows her into the tower with Kiriko (Ko Shibasaki), one of the maids. Below is a sea, a stone gate, pelicans, and the warawara, small white spirits like puffballs that rise at night in their hundreds and drift upwards to be born. We had not expected to be moved by a swarm of dumplings, and we were.
Joe Hisaishi’s score is his most held-back for Miyazaki: mostly piano, single notes, long stretches of nothing, and the strings arrive late. The editing, credited to Takeshi Seyama, Akane Shiraishi and Rie Matsubara, lets the house scenes run long. In the tower it starts to jump. There is Himi (Aimyon), a girl who throws fire. There are parakeets the size of men, in aprons, with knives and forks, ruled by a Parakeet King (Jun Kunimura) of enormous self-regard. Every ten minutes there is a new rule, and the rules come in speeches.
That is the problem. The second half becomes a story about inheritance that we will not describe, and Miyazaki, who has spent a career trusting children to keep up, twice has a character stand still and tell Mahito what this world is and what it wants from him. The parakeets are funny, and there are a great many of them, and by the third crowd scene we wanted to get back to the boy. Santoki plays Mahito flat and watchful, which is right for the first hour and gives the second less to hold on to.
It borrows openly from itself. The tower has the bathhouse of Spirited Away in it, and the country house, the move from the city and the absent mother all come from My Neighbour Totoro. Most critics have taken this as a summing-up and scored it close to his best. We would put it below those two and above Howl’s Moving Castle and Ponyo, which is not a complaint. At 124 minutes it could lose a parakeet or two.
See it in Japanese, on the biggest screen you can find, with a child of ten or over who does not need everything explained. Adults will want more explanation than the film gives, and less than it gives when it finally does.
