124 min | PG-13 | December 8, 2023 | GKIDS
A boy loses his mother to a wartime fire and follows a talking heron into a tower where the dead still walk. Hayao Miyazaki comes back after a decade to ask whether a broken world is worth rebuilding. He hands you no map and trusts you to find your way out.
Mahito Maki loses his mother to fire in wartime Tokyo. His father remarries her sister and moves the boy to a country estate. A gray heron starts speaking to Mahito and lures him into a crumbling tower where the dead are not gone and the living do not stay themselves. Hayao Miyazaki builds a fantasy about grief and the impossible work of choosing to inhabit a broken world. The film is really about a man at the end of his life deciding whether the world is worth rebuilding.
Soma Santoki voices Mahito as a closed fist of a boy. He grieves without crying and obeys without warmth. Masaki Suda plays the Gray Heron as a con artist whose menace collapses into something pathetic and then loyal. The voice work makes the bird repulsive before it makes him a friend. Aimyon gives Lady Himi a fierce brightness that explains everything about her once the film reveals who she is.
Miyazaki writes and directs with the confidence of a man answering only to himself. He stages the early fire as smeared, warping animation that refuses to settle into clean lines. The blur is the point. A boy cannot see his burning mother clearly and neither can we. Joe Hisaishi scores the film with restraint and lets long stretches play on ambient sound, the creak of the tower and the rush of wind through paper.
The film does not explain itself and does not apologize for that. It moves by dream logic where pelicans starve and small white spirits drift up to be born. Miyazaki hands the boy a stack of clean building blocks and asks whether he will build a world free of malice or walk back into the flawed one. Mahito chooses the flawed one. So does the film, and it earns the choice.