Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, Studio Ghibli's latest film, is finally out in the US. Without giving anything away, it's a wondrous and moving story of childhood, grief, and what it means to live.
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Shoutout to the Japan Society in NYC, which kindly invited me to an early screening of the movie. If you're interested in seeing their other upcoming events, click here.
So, here are just some of the things that went into creating the animated movie:
1. Miyazaki previously announced that he would be retiring following the release of his 2013 movie, The Wind Rises. He had also announced retirement in 1997, after Princess Mononoke, and in 2001, after Spirited Away.
2. As such, The Boy and the Heron is the 82-year-old's first feature film in a decade. In a project proposal written in 2016 by Miyazaki for what would become the movie, he wrote, "There is nothing more pathetic than telling the world you'll retire because of your age, then making yet another comeback."
3. The movie is semi-autobiographical. Studio Ghibli producer and co-founder, Toshio Suzuki, said in 2017 that the movie was for Miyazaki's grandson: "Grandpa is moving on to the next world, but he’s leaving behind this film.”
4. The Japanese title of The Boy and the Heron is How Do You Live? It's also the title of a real-life 1937 novel that was given to Miyazaki in his youth by his mother, as is depicted in the movie.
5. A few of the autobiographical elements include Miyazaki's father, who was the director of a company that manufactured fighter plane parts during WWII. His mother was bedridden for much of his childhood, albeit from Pott disease.
6. Miyazaki's own childhood was further marked by war. "I was born in 1941 [...] and had a strong feeling in my childhood that we had ‘fought a truly stupid war,'" he wrote in 2013. "I heard adults speak boastfully of the horrible things they had done on the Chinese continent. At the same time, I also heard about the extent of the horrors of the air raids [on Japan]. I heard many stories and I started to think that I had been born in a country that had done stupid things."
7. The movie took seven years to make, but Studio Ghibli denied that it was impacted by the COVID pandemic. Unusually, the movie's release date was only confirmed once the movie was completed — with Miyazaki's age cited as a reason why this movie took longer than others. "We are still hand-drawing everything, but it takes us more time to complete a film because we're drawing more frames," Producer Toshio Suzuki told Entertainment Weekly in 2020.
8. Indeed, the sheer scale of the animation required for the movie led Suzuki to speculate that it was probably the most expensive movie to have ever been made in Japan.
9. Animator Toshiyuki Inoue, who first began working with Miyazaki on Kiki’s Delivery Service, said that he had heard "scary things" about working with him and was uncertain about taking on a Miyazaki-helmed project. Of his actual experience, he said that it was "not as scary as I had imagined" — but later said that he "probably wouldn’t have participated" in The Boy and the Heron had it not been for the insistence of animation director Takeshi Honda.
10. Almost all of the main characters are taken from Miyazaki's drawings, with the exception of Natsuko. "Miyazaki isn’t very good at designing adult women, so when he tries to draw women with lipstick or who just look mature, it ends up looking weird," Inoue continued. "[Honda] just copied Miyazaki’s drawings for Mahito, the old men and women, but in Natsuko’s case, he made his own changes."
11. Akihiko Yamashita, an animator who worked on a certain scene with frogs, said of the moment, "I didn’t intend to make it scary when I drew it. I thought that if I drew the frogs and fishes too realistically, it might feel gross to the viewers — actually, I drew it realistically first, and I was the one to feel bad! So, I rather approached it as something comical or rather grotesque: I tried to create a completely surreal atmosphere without any connection to reality. That’s how it ended up as scary, I think."
12. Yamashita further said that the most difficult scene to animate was when Mahito is on a ship and the waves crash around. He explained, "It wasn’t that hard to draw each element individually, but the difficulty was in putting all of them together. I had to find the good rhythm, the perfect timing through which each of the four elements would perfectly complement the others. And I had to convey the right atmosphere for this moment. It really wasn’t easy, but I think I found the right shortcut, and I’m pretty happy about it now."
13. The inscription on the entrance in the tower reads, "fecemi la divina potestate." It is a line from Dante's Inferno, meaning, "Divine power has created me."
14. Joe Hisaishi composed the music for The Boy and the Heron, as he has for every Miyazaki Studio Ghibli movie. He told Crunchy Roll, "Whenever I begin working on new film music for Hayao Miyazaki I prepare myself mentally. For [The Boy and the Heron], I thought about the 'world' and the music I want to create. I want my music to capture the emotion and imagery as you watch the film. It has been a long but enjoyable process."
15. Much of the English dub voice-acting cast has been in prior Studio Ghibli movies. This includes Mark Hamil, who was in Castle in the Sky and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Christian Bale, who was Howl in Howl's Moving Castle, and Willem Dafoe, who was in Tales from Earthsea.
16. There was no promotion for The Boy and the Heron in Japan. Yep, no trailers or official images — just one poster that gave away very little. It set a three-day opening record for ticket sales in Japan.
17. Finally, The Boy and the Heron has been touted as Miyazaki's final movie, Studio Ghibli executive Junichi Nishioka said in September that Miyazaki was, in fact, coming into work every day and working on a new movie.
