In the late twentieth century, there was a bit of folkloric wisdom in the world of cinema that argued that all the good movies had been made by the 1970s. With some notable exceptions, the movies of the 80s and 90s were largely remakes, pastiches, or parodies of earlier and better films. Such a view, although not entirely true, is consistent with the post-modern era, which peaked during this time. One of the many characteristics of postmodernism is the proliferation of images and reproductions. In this view, much of the 80s and 90s cinema was just photocopying of earlier and better films. Some may, of course, object and argue that the 90s, with breakout (but often morally objectionable) works by Quentin Tarantino, Richard Linklater, and the Coen Brothers, was at least a Silver Age of independent cinema, and the 00s saw the creation of some of the best epic films made in decades, e.g., Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.
However, few film buffs would disagree with the argument that much of the 2020s, with very few exceptions, have seen the utter collapse of cinema. It is well known that twenty-first-century studios will very rarely take a risk with an intelligent and well-crafted film. Known as the “Marvelization” or “Disneyification” (with no disrespect to Walt) of cinema (and TV), movies today are created simply as a product to be consumed by a global audience that is willing to shell out money for a familiar franchise or character—regardless of the quality of the film.
One exception to this trend is the Japanese film company Studio Ghibli. Headed by one of the greatest living filmmakers, Hayao Miyazaki, over the past forty years, Ghibli has produced some of the most beautiful and philosophically rich films, including and especially My Neighbor Totoro (1988), Princess Monoke (1997), and Spirited Away (2001). Miyazaki’s films are mesmerizing and contain elements of joy and humor, but they are ultimately weighted by a deep melancholy. Miyazaki’s films are often about the trauma Japan experienced during the Second World War, but they are also about individual and familial trauma. The films frequently deal with the loss of a parent to death or physical or mental illness and a child’s escape into the world of imagination after that loss. However, the imaginative world into which Miyazaki’s characters escape is not merely an illusion. Deeply influenced by the Japanese religion of Shinto, Miyazaki’s films further deal with the crossing of the space of everyday life into magical worlds.
Miyazaki himself is a bit of a riddle. On one hand, he is generally identified as a man of the Japanese left. Miyazaki’s films generally depict war and militarism in a negative light. In The Wind Rises, his 2013 historical drama about the life of Jiro Horikoshi, the Japanese aeronautical engineer who designed the famous Mitsubishi A5M fighter, Miyazaki depicts war or the spirit of war as malevolent bombs with demonic faces. Thus, rather than critiquing individuals involved in war, Miyazaki sees war as a power or force that consumes individual people and nature. Miyazaki had made earlier waves in 2003 when he refused to come to the United States to receive his Oscar; Miyazaki later explained that his refusal was in response to the US bombing of Iraq—his 2004 Howl’s Moving Castle is, at least on one level, a critique of the Iraq War as well as the poisonous effects of (post-)industrial modernity. Miyazaki further stirred controversy in 2015 with his comments about then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s desire to strengthen the Japanese military. Miyazaki sees war and modernity as two intertwined cancers that destroy human, animal, and other natural (and even supernatural) life. Princess Mononoke, set in a fantasy version of the Muromachi Period of Japanese history, presents a critique of premodern human industry which (over-) consumes lumber and minerals to provide increasingly advanced forms of human civilization. It also shows how war and the desire for revenge ravages human, animal, and divine hearts.
Miyazaki sees war and modernity as two intertwined cancers that destroy human, animal, and other natural (and even supernatural) life.
At the same time, Miyazaki’s work is not anti-human or anti-Japanese or even, necessarily, anti-technological. In The Wind Rises, Jiro’s planes are born from a dream to create beautiful works of art in imitation of Italian engineer Giovanni Battista Caproni—not from a desire to destroy human life. The leader of the human manufacturing camp in Princess Mononoke, Lady Eboshi, is not a bloodthirsty destroyer of nature but rather someone with a deep concern for helping marginalized figures (as well as a shrewd businesswoman). In many ways, Miyazaki is a deeply traditional Japanese man who likewise weaves Western fairytales and stories into his film, providing an homage as opposed to a bitter critique of human culture and civilization.
In his most recent work, The Boy and the Heron (released for home viewing this summer), Hayao Miyazaki crafts a brilliant although flawed film that reflects a wider and deeper critique of the excesses of twenty-first-century culture and politics while still remaining firmly grounded in Japanese history and culture (with ample injections of Western art and thought as well).
The Boy and the Heron tells the story of a Japanese boy named Mahito Maki whose mother dies during a firebombing raid on Tokyo. Mahito moves with his father, who has remarried, to a rural setting where Mahito discovers a tower that one of his stepmother’s ancestors built around a meteorite. Bullied at school and unsettled about his father’s new marriage, Mahito (and the peasant woman Kiriko) are led by a mysterious Heron into the tower—through which he is transported to a magical world, where he encounters his mother along with a host of magical (and sometimes dangerous) creatures. He eventually encounters the man who built the tower and who, humorously, had gone mad reading books. The film ends with a Stanley Kubrick/Christopher Nolan-esque meditation on the role of the artist in shaping reality and the role of the audience in shaping the future.
Upon first glance, The Boy and the Heron has everything Ghibli fans love about Miyazaki’s films. The Japanese landscape is bursting with both natural and supernatural beauty. The architecture of the homes in The Boy and the Heron, like that of the homes in the oft-forgotten Ghibli classic, Whisper of the Heart (1995), contains both traditional Japanese as well as “fairytale” versions of 19th-century European architecture. In The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki likewise captures the quirky humor of the Japanese peasant class as well as the majestic seriousness and elegance of Japanese aristocrats (while, at the same time, poking fun at them). The scenes in which Mahito encounters his mother as a young girl/fire spirt who leads him, like Beatrice in Dante’s Commedia, throughout the magic world, are deeply moving.
This spooky but cuddly fantasy world is marked by a brutal and sometimes bloody realism typical of Miyazaki. The young Kiriko (one of the themes of the film is old people turning young again) fillets a giant, monstrous fish that she feeds to spirits. The Warawara, marshmallow-like spirits who appear to resemble human souls as well as an artist’s creative ideas, are eaten by Pelicans whom Mahito’s mother burns with fire—one bloodied and wounded Pelican explains to Mahito that the Pelicans eat the Warawara because the Pelicans have nothing else to eat. Perhaps the most (albeit humorously) frightening creatures in the magic world are the parakeets who feed on humans. Thus, Miyazaki should never be considered a mere illusionist but rather someone very much aware of both the beauty and the brutality of life.
The parakeets in the film appear to be a parody of twenty-first-century populism, with its promise of enormous quantities of food as well as its fetishization of weapons, physical violence, and war.
The parakeets in the film—especially the Parakeet King (voiced by Dave Bautista in the English version)—appear to be a parody of twenty-first-century populism, which itself often takes the form of a parody of twentieth-century populism, which, likewise, was a parody of earlier, premodern forms of communalism and authoritarianism. The parakeets in the film are enormous creatures that spend much of their time deceptively trying to butcher humans with the large knives that they carry. Near the end of the film, Mahito awakens in a prison to the sound of a parakeet sharpening a butcher knife, and a grotesque bucket of (human?) meat and bones lying on the kitchen counter. As the scene continues, we see a kitchen full of carcasses, blood, and meat. One of the striking features of contemporary populism is the promise of enormous quantities of food (especially animal meat—the consumption of which is frequently feted on various rightist social media platforms) as well as its fetishization of weapons, physical violence, and war.
Like the infamous 1974 film, the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Miyazaki, through his parakeets’ lust for human flesh, is perhaps commenting on the cruel and grotesque phenomenon of industrialized meat production. However, in The Boy and the Heron, this meat consumption has a decidedly political cast. The parakeets are also preparing enormous quantities of vegetables, which they transport while walking in “goose step” like the German Wehrmacht soldiers of World War II. The parakeets further march, brandishing swords, in a military parade while Himi is carried on a bier. The hysterical and wild behavior of the parakeets observing the military parade is, again, a not-too-subtle commentary on how political populism can reach a hysterical state. Some of these parakeets are carrying signs that say Duch, which, as some commentators have noted, is an unsubtle reference to Benito Mussolini’s title of Duce.
Miyazaki is clearly contrasting “real life” and the (often illusory) nature of populist hysteria, which relies on pomp and pageantry and transports citizens to an idealized fantasy world.
When the Parakeet King stops the parade at the base of the tower, the parakeets beg humorously and wildly beg to go with him—one of them even states, “We live to serve you!” Populism can, at times, take a “cultish” and servile character as it did during the rise of fascism as well as in our own contemporary milieu. Before heading up the tower, the parakeet king says, “Subjects live well in my absence.” One of the parakeets shouts, “Three cheers for our noble parakeet king!” to thunderous shouting of parakeets. Meanwhile, Mahito and the Grey Heron or “Birdman” must climb their way through the walls of the tower and scale its dangerous sides. Miyazaki is clearly contrasting “real life” and the (often illusory) nature of populist hysteria, which relies on pomp and pageantry and transports citizens to an idealized fantasy world.
The Parakeet King does charge through some electric field, but his actions and language are all marked by exaggeration and heightened (and seemingly empty) rhetoric. Miyazaki makes an (unfair) jab at certain forms of religion when the parakeets enter Granduncle’s gardens, which they, pouring out tears, think is paradise. However, the Parakeet King and his subjects, despite their hunger for human flesh, are not entirely evil. More than the brutal violence of 1930s and 40s totalitarian government, they resemble what George Monbiot and Peter Hutchison, in their recent work, Invisible Doctrine: The Secret History of Neoliberalism, call the “killer clowns” of twenty-first-century populism. Monbiot and Hutchison point to Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi as the first killer clown, who pushed forward populism with a buffoonish and cartoonish personality that appealed to the masses and, occasionally, disarmed his opponents.
Just as twenty-first-century culture is a heightened continuation of twentieth-century postmodernism, so too is our present century’s politics a heightened continuation of postmodern politics: irony and image gloss over a potentially more serious and dangerous interior of realpolitik. Just as the Parakeet King is a clumsy simulacra of a great premodern warrior leader, so too are at least some twenty-first-century populist leaders simulacra of the earlier warrior kings (and queens) they attempt to mimic on social media.
Our present century’s politics are a heightened continuation of postmodern politics: irony and image gloss over a potentially more serious and dangerous interior of realpolitik.
At the same time, the film is slightly clunky and tries to do too much while being too self-aware. Like many twenty-first-century movies, The Boy and the Heron very much resembles two films: it is a mournful but also joyous exploration of family and the wonders of the human imagination while at the same time being a perhaps all too serious reflection on the social role of the artist today. With the flashing lights and big issue theological and cosmic questions, The Boy and the Heron is a lot like Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. There is a giant stone, meditations on time and space, and a pervasive weirdness to the film that borders on the grotesque—the giant parakeets, which appear to be parodies of (American?) right-wing populists as well as consumerism in general, attempt to eat the humans in the magical world on the other side of the tower. If 2001 is a brilliant and beautiful but ultimately very weird film, then so is The Boy and the Heron. This is by no means to denigrate the work of Miyazaki as a whole, but rather to note that, “even Homer errs,” even the best artists craft works that some viewers find distasteful.
The standard reading of Hayao Miyazaki and his films is that they are greatly affected by Miyazaki’s left-leaning worldview. Throughout his works, militarism is condemned as both buffoonish and dangerous, and humans usually have to learn to live in concert with nature—a central theme of Miyazaki’s masterpiece Princess Mononoke. However, Miyazaki does not lecture the audience but rather weaves his vision into masterfully wrought films. Ultimately, for better or worse, Miyazaki is a left-wing filmmaker (with a paradoxically conservative and traditionalist imagination) whose works are so majestic and philosophically profound that individuals of a wide variety of political stripes can enjoy his films, and, despite its minor flaws, The Boy and the Heron is a deeply rich work worthy of a skilled and seasoned artist.
Jesse Russell is the author of The Political Christopher Nolan: Liberalism and the Anglo-American Tradition. He has also published in scholarly journals such as Politics and Religion and Political Theology.
