Everyone knows Hayao Miyazaki. And even if you found someone (how?!) who didn’t, they would surely know one of his works โ be it the Oscar-winning Spirited Away (2001), the fairy-tale-like Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), or the iconic My Neighbour Totoro (1988).
The Miyazaki we all know is an endlessly talented genius: a man who has dedicated his existence to creating life with pencil and paper, animating stories, ideals, and emotions, and using his art to defend nature and life.
Some of us, the ones who have gone beyond his films to explore the documentaries about his work process and life, know Miyazaki as a kind, smiley, and unbelievably creative man who is also a grumpy perfectionist. He often complained about the cameras around him and obsessed over what mattered most to him: his art.
But Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, Kaku Arakawa’s documentary that came out on Netflix last Friday, offers us a different side to that Miyazaki we thought we knew.
Released at this yearโs Cannes Film Festival, where Studio Ghibli received an honorary Palme dโOr, Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is a two-hour feature documenting the seven-year production of The Boy and the Heron.
No time for the complete review? Make sure to check our summary at the bottom!
Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron: It’s All a Matter of Time
Raw, creative, and bittersweet, Arakawaโs documentary shows us a mellower Miyazaki, one who smiles through his pain and frustration and becomes lonelier and lonelier with the passing of his greatest and closest friends.
Cameras don’t seem to bother Miyazaki so much anymore and, instead, he engages in conversation with his documentarian much more freely than in the past. He shares his exasperation more openly and constantly refers to the friends who aren’t around anymore. He hardly hides his heartache, which clearly shows through his words and smiles. His signature grin is an almost constant presence in Arakawa’s shots as if Miyazaki refuses to let reality โ and time โ corrupt him.
Time being the key word here: Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is about time.
Time that passes and we don’t realise it.
Time that takes our loved ones away from us.
Time that we spend doing what matters to us, with those who matter to us.
In Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, the world’s most famous animation director is trying to understand the nature of time. This might be what has made him considerably more affable.
Make no mistake: Miyazaki is still very much consumed by this constant flux of images that seem to flood his brain. And he’s still keen to reproduce them on paper as precisely as he deems necessary. But this Miyazaki, who is still obsessed with his art, now understands that, at some point, he’ll have to let it go. He still sits at his desk, with his pencils and cigarettes, and redoes the same storyboards over and over again. Leg fidgeting, he still redraws the same frames time and time again. This time, however, he doesn’t grumble and curse as much. At some point, it’s time to stop and he now knows it: after days and days trying to correct a frame of Himi, he decides it’s time to “delegate it,” as he puts it. He lets someone younger finish the corrections.
Is it because he’s now older? Is that the result of age?
Coming to Terms With Ageing: The Loss of One’s Dearest Companions
In between his birthday celebrations with the vivacious neighbourhood kids, Miyazaki fills his days with the creation of new ideas and scenes for his then-new film, The Boy and The Heron. His time, ticking away the same as it always has, is full of life.
All this life โ both from the children around him and the vitality he provides to his own stories โ can only exist because all life eventually ends.
In Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, Miyazaki is forced to face the fate of Sophie, his own heroine from Howlโs Moving Castle. Like Sophie, it is as if he woke up one day in the body of a seventy (and then eighty)-year-old man whose friends are no more. After all, it really was only yesterday that Studio Ghibli released Only Yesterdayโฆ Wasn’t it? Where did time go?
Completely different from the Miyazaki from previous documentaries, this Miyazaki is now coming to terms with ageing. But what truly haunts him isnโt the increasing fragility of his own body โ itโs the loss of his loved companions. From the great director Takahata Isao to the amazing colourist Yasuda Michiyo, we watch as time takes friend by friend away, leaving Miyazaki to hold on to their memory through his art.
Grief, to Miyazaki, takes the colours and shapes of The Boy and the Heron.
Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron: How Arawaka Honestly Portrays His Subject
The genius Miyazaki, through Arakawaโs lenses, is simply human. These lenses embrace Miyazaki’s very human vulnerability, sorrow, and determination to understand โ and design โ his own journey.
Because that’s what Miyazaki has always done: he has used his art to process, understand, and design his own existence, beliefs, and emotions.
Arawaka makes it all very clear by editing Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron with moments of quick cuts, intertwining Miyazaki’s life with glimpses of his films. It’s as if his filmography not only reflects his biography but also responds to it, serving answers to questions that the director continues to ask himself. At the same time, the editing also contrasts Miyazaki’s seemingly peaceful life with the bustle and agitation of the ideas inside his head. “He blows away the line between fantasy and reality,” says long-time collaborator and Studio Ghibli producer Toshio Suzuki during the documentary. Miyazaki’s existence dances between his imagination and factuality โ and thanks to Arakawa’s editing, the viewer can empathise with that blurred line. Is this just a Studio Ghibli movie or is this real? Maybe Miyazaki knows just as much as we do.
But Arawaka also excels at giving Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron a poignant narrative structure. The feature doesn’t document the production of The Boy and the Heron as much as it documents how Miyazaki’s life in the past few years has been punctuated by loss. And, instead of brooding over his own mortality, Miyazaki uses those losses to reflect on his existence.
Don’t get me wrong: you’ll see him questioning whether he’ll be the next to go more than just a few times. But he moves past these questions quickly because, to Miyazaki, it’s how he lives life that matters.
The Boy and the Heron: Miyazaki’s Grieving Process
Miyazaki then decides to challenge loss. He decides to keep the memory of those he loved alive through him, through The Boy and the Heron.
The spirit of Pak-san (which is how Miyazaki refers to Takahata) is still stealing his erasers. Michiyo is still telling him to make another film.
Miyazaki is constantly trying to create life.
And then, you come to understand with Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron that Miyazaki’s obsession with work wasn’t as much about being a workaholic as it was about the people around him.
The connections with Pak-san, with Michiyo, with mentors and assistants โ that’s what Miyazaki was obsessing over. His passion wasn’t just for animation. It wasn’t just about giving life to all of these ideas and magical scenarios that live in a fog inside his head. His passion was for the collaborative effort that he and the people around him put into their art. It was for the exchanges, the laughter, and also the fights they had.
It’s the life he lived with them, the art they created together, that gave Miyazaki the strength to create the film that took him out of retirement. And never before had he opened himself up to his own art to this extent. The Boy and the Heron is a memoir, one that pays homage to the life Miyazaki lived with the friends who left him behind.
How Do We Live?
Through Arakawa’s Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, Miyazaki himself becomes his most intriguing character. His relationships โ with Suzuki, Pak-san, Michiyo โ gain an extraordinarily loving aura, one that allows the audience to connect with and mourn alongside Miyazaki. At the same time, his journey towards The Boy and the Heron asks and answers a very important question.
The original Japanese title for The Boy and the Heron is ๅใใกใฏใฉใ็ใใใ: How do you live?
That’s the question The Boy and the Heron, as well as Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, ask us. They also offer us some possible answers.
During a poignant sequence, Miyazaki says:
Mahito learns to accept others. Understand them, share their feelings. When he looks at the world in a different way, he finds solutions to his problems. Just think of all the support I got from adults. You forget about it as you grow up. But they gave us so much support. I never intentionally harmed myself. But I came close a few times. I think that’s normal for kids. Life can be unbelievably tough. It was for me. Kids have things inside them. Black seeds. Even when they seem happy. Old people can help them figure things out. I think that’s our purpose.
We live with others. We live by empathising, by giving and receiving support, by allowing others to show us different points of view.
We live by creating โ whether that’s art, stories, or connections.
By the end of Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, you can’t help but wonder: how do I live?
Quick warning: to fully appreciate Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, it’s best to have at least a general knowledge of Miyazaki’s works. But if you have only watched The Boy and the Heron, Arakawa’s documentary is still very much worth a watch as it helps us understand the film a lot better.
An excellent documentary, Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is a must-watch for all Ghibli fans. You can watch it on:
No time for the entire review? No problem! You can pin our summary!
Leave a Reply