Exploring the Meaning of The Boy and the Heron

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron debuted at number one at the US box office over the December 8 weekend. If you’re on the fence about seeing it, this is your nudge. It’s a Miyazaki Ghibli film. Of course you should see it. And after you have, come back with a cup of tea. We’re going to take the movie apart and discuss some of its themes and how they compare to Miyazaki’s other works.

Major spoilers ahead—this article assumes you’ve seen the film.

© 2023 Studio Ghibli

The Boy and the Heron is breathtaking. It is also slow and cryptic. It has fantastical imagery and Ghibli’s signature food scenes. There is pristine nature and violent ugliness. If you’ve seen Miyazaki’s other works, a lot feels familiar. Yet the meaning of this film seems more shrouded. At its surface level, The Boy and the Heron is about a boy’s process of accepting his mother’s death and his father’s remarriage.

But that can’t be all of it, can it? After all, in this strange world Mahito journeys through, pelicans eat people. Parakeets eat people, too. Souls called the Warawara float into the sky, and the dead clamor to eat a fish they cannot kill. The entire world exists because Mahito’s granduncle makes a deal with a giant celestial rock: Iif he doesn’t stack white stones every three days, the world ends. What is the point of the nebulous and sometimes disturbing imagery?

How Do You Live?

About one-third of the way through the movie, Mahito finds a book titled How Do You Live? When he discovers the book is from his mother, he reads it, weeping as he does so.

I find this scene telling. How Do You Live is a real book, and what Miyazaki loosely based his film on. The direct translation of the movie’s original Japanese title is also How Do You Live? Renaming the film for Western release was a mistake—The Boy and the Heron obscures its meaning by putting the focus on the relationship instead of the question.

If we take the entire film and filter it through the lens of “How do you live?” the meaning becomes clearer. It depicts how people, both humans and not, live their lives.

Even simple scenes, such as the one shown here, reinforce the movie’s main theme. © 2023 Studio Ghibli

When the Warawara are being eaten by the pelicans, Mahito is horrified. He sees the pelicans as evil. After Hime burns the pelicans, one falls where Mahito is standing, bloodied and dying. Mahito asks how it could do something as repulsive as eat the Warawara. The pelican gives an unexpected answer: It tells Mahito the pelicans were brought to that world by the master. But in that world, there is no food they can eat. They can only survive by eating the Warawara.

Mahito listens. When the pelican dies, he buries it. He ascribes worth to the pelican. He ascribes humanity to the pelican. In this world, everyone, from the parakeets to Kiriko, is trying to live their lives as best they can.

The importance of how people live their lives ties back to the production of Miyazaki’s last film, 2013’s The Wind Rises. Miyazaki is famously a pacifist, yet he decided to make a film about Jirō Horikoshi, the man who invented the infamous World War II Japanese bomber, the Zero. In the documentary 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki, the director is profoundly anguished by this duality. His hesitation even caused issues with the movie’s production.

But everything changed after Miyazaki and his wife visited a leprosy colony exhibit. He learned about the colonies’ occupants and how they were cut off from society. Yet, even amid their suffering, they continued to live as best they could.

That experience had a profound impact on Miyazaki and changed the way he viewed his movie. In the documentary, he says, “They [Jirō and Nahoko] lived their lives fully. We must show that … how they live is what matters.”

Cursed Dreams

In another documentary, The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, Miyazaki says, “You know, people who design airplanes and machines, no matter how much they believe what they do is good, the winds of time eventually turn them into the tools of industrial civilization. It’s never unscathed. They’re cursed dreams. Today, all of humanity’s dreams are cursed. Beautiful but cursed dreams.”

The world created by Mahito’s granduncle is a beautiful, cursed dream. Granduncle says the world is tainted because he is tainted. He brought the pelicans and the parakeets to make the world beautiful, but they turned into monsters because they were hungry. Granduncle’s expansive and awe-inspiring world is built on nothing more than stacking stones—if they’re not stacked correctly, the entire world will disappear.

When Mahito is offered untainted stones to build his own world, he declines. He says that he, too, is tainted. This answer surprises Granduncle. “But what about all the horrors in the real world?” he asks.

One lesson Mahito learns is that he cannot escape from pain. He cannot bring his mother back. Both the real world and Granduncle’s world have suffering. But in the real world, there is a chance for healing. When Mahito accepts Natsuko as his mother, she snaps out of her delirious state. She has also been grieving. But together, she and Mahito can find a way to move forward. They can find a way to live.

© 2023 Studio Ghibli

The Endcap to All of Miyazaki’s Works

You can find the duality of humanity’s ugliness and beauty throughout all of Miyazaki’s films. In Ponyo, Fujimoto takes off from a glorious and pristine underwater world to make his way up to the shores of Japan. As he nears the island, he zips through piles of underwater garbage. “Humans are disgusting!” he spits.

Humanity’s actions in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind are the reason the population is on the verge of extinction. Yet one girl finds a way to live in harmony with the toxic jungle. In Howl’s Moving Castle, love develops between two people while bombs drop on cute little villages. In Princess Mononoke, a woman harms the forest gods while giving refuge to sex workers with nowhere else to turn.

Miyazaki intuitively understands humans and, as a result, tells very human stories. It doesn’t matter whether his films take place in the future, the present, the past, or an imagined world—there’s a lot of stuff to get out of them. The Boy and the Heron will rightfully take its place in the catalog of his works as thought provoking and grand. Miyazaki says he wants to make another film. I hope he does. For now, we’ll do our best to answer his question, How do you live?

The Boy and the Heron is still in theaters after its limited US run was extended. You can watch 10 Years with Hayao Miyazaki for free on NHK World-Japan’s website. The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is streaming on Max.