The Boy and the Heron (2023): Three Miyazakis, Cold Stones, and a Father’s Message

Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (Studio Ghibli Official) is an animated feature released in Japan on July 14, 2023.

If I remember correctly, the first hint of this film came at the very end of the NHK BS documentary Never-Ending Man: Hayao Miyazaki(終わらない人 宮﨑駿, in Japanese), broadcast in January 2017. Miyazaki handed a proposal for a feature film to producer Toshio Suzuki. Its Japanese title, How Do You Live?, was revealed that October.

After a long, impatient wait, all we had seen before release was the key visual of a Grey Heron. Yet that silence gave me an extraordinary piece of luck: seeing a new Miyazaki film without any prior knowledge. I would like to thank Toshio Suzuki for that.

Soon after release, people were calling the film ‘difficult’ or saying it made no sense. Personally, I think ‘complicated’ is closer. Individual elements carry several meanings and projections at once, making the whole thing very tangled.

I want to think through The Boy and the Heron here. If I had to describe it in one sentence, I would say:

This is the story of Hayao Miyazaki choosing to be a father.

That is my personal reading, but it is much too broad on its own. It is not all I want to say either, so let’s flesh it out.

First, let’s consider the father as a father to his son, something I do not think Miyazaki’s earlier films have depicted in quite this way.

*Please note: the following discussion contains spoilers throughout.

*This is a translated version. The original (Japanese) is available here.

On this pageContentsHideShow

01

An Analysis of The Boy and the Heron

A Father to His Son

The Grey Heron's Lure: "Your Mother"

The False Mother and the World Mahito Enters

The Lively Mother and the Echoes of Ponyo

What Natsuko’s Presence Means

The Granduncle’s Precarious Stones

A Buddy Film: Miyazaki, Suzuki, and Yasuda

Time Travel and a Puzzling Timeline

The Mysterious Shrine

Mahito’s Decision: Miyazaki’s First Message

Mahito’s Father: Miyazaki’s Second Message

02

The Boy and the Heron: Summary and Impressions

Putting the Readings Together

The Joy and Confusion of Seeing It Blind

The Scary, Scary Stepmother Natsuko

Mahito's Malice

The Immortal Miyazaki Humor

An Analysis of The Boy and the Heron

A Father to His Son

One clear difference between The Boy and the Heron and earlier Miyazaki films is how vividly Mahito’s father is drawn: a father to his son. There will be objections to this, of course, but let’s look back at the fathers in those earlier films:

Pazu’s father is shown in a painting in Castle in the Sky, but it is hard to say he appears as a character. Howl might be called a substitute father to Markl in Howl’s Moving Castle, though I do not think he really fulfills a father’s role.

The only earlier example of a father to a son was Koichi in Ponyo, and he is sent off across the sea early in the story. At least, we do not see him spending time with Sosuke.

In The Boy and the Heron, however, father and son are shown together, with scene after scene demonstrating how deeply Mahito’s father loves him. Surely I was not the only person moved by the sight of him taking up a sword for his son.

The question is why Miyazaki chose to show that relationship here.

To understand it, we need to consider the fantasy part of the film.

The Grey Heron’s Lure: “Your Mother”

The Boy and the Heron begins in what seems to be a remarkably grounded, non-fantastical world. The Grey Heron then draws Mahito into a fantasy world of the kind Miyazaki does so well.

What matters is the word the Grey Heron uses to lure him: ‘Mother.’

Miyazaki’s mother suffered from spinal tuberculosis and was bedridden during his childhood. Various accounts describe how being unable to spend time with her simply as a child remained lodged in him like a wedge.

For someone carrying those feelings, not depicting mothers would be the real escape. Instead, Miyazaki has found cunning ways to depict his mother in his films.

Put another way, his ‘mother’ has been confined within his own works.

That is the kind of world the Grey Heron draws Mahito into.

The False Mother and the World Mahito Enters

The first figure Mahito sees inside the tower is his mother. For a moment, the Grey Heron seems to have kept his word, but she is a false mother made of water.

From here, the film moves deeper into fantasy, and the meaning of what we see becomes harder to grasp. Since the world that follows so clearly resembles earlier Miyazaki films, I think we can provisionally read it as a symbol of Miyazaki’s inner world.

Introducing a false mother first might therefore be a declaration: ‘The mothers I have depicted before were false’—or ‘This time, I will depict the mother I need to depict.’

By this point, I think we can see Mahito as an alter ego of Hayao Miyazaki—the first such figure in the film. His father’s work in aviation also points that way: Miyazaki’s father, Katsuji, was a director of Miyazaki Airplane.

The Lively Mother and the Echoes of Ponyo

If Mahito is an alter ego of Miyazaki, his mother could be an alter ego of Miyazaki’s mother too.

She is not the bedridden woman fixed in his memory, but an extremely lively girl who seems about Mahito’s age.

This striking creative choice immediately calls Ponyo to mind.

The documentary How Ponyo Was Born(ポニョはこうして生まれた, in Japanese) helps us see Miyazaki’s mother reflected in Toki, the somewhat unapproachable old woman in Ponyo.

Perhaps Toki’s prickliness reflects the difficulty of approaching a mother confined to bed.

Near the end of Ponyo, Sosuke’s embrace with Toki may have been a kind of dream for Miyazaki, while her running energetically inside the underwater dome may have expressed a wish of his.

Yet in Ponyo, Toki was still an old woman. In a sense, that kept the portrayal grounded.

In The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki removes that limit: he depicts his mother, at a young age he never knew, moving about full of life. And he makes the connection recognizable.

He may have depicted a young, energetic mother indirectly before, but not faced her so directly. Perhaps this was another reason to make the film: a feeling that he still had something he needed to do.

What Natsuko’s Presence Means

The film includes Mahito’s biological mother and Natsuko, his stepmother. Why is Natsuko part of this story?

I suspect there are two reasons.

One is the need for an inner reason for Mahito to be drawn to the strange tower. If he were satisfied with his present life, he would not need to enter it, nor would he injure his own head.

Natsuko represents a kind of dissatisfaction for Mahito, which propels the early part of the story.

The other reason may be that their relationship also expresses something of Miyazaki’s relationship with his mother.

Perhaps the difficulty of approaching his bedridden mother, at the age when he most wanted her affection, appears in the story through Natsuko. Seen this way, Miyazaki may have decided to depict all the different aspects of his mother in this film.

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The Granduncle’s Precarious Stones

If the world Mahito enters symbolizes Miyazaki’s inner world, we can begin to understand the stones the Granduncle keeps in such a precarious balance.

To do so, we need to consider Miyazaki’s way of making films. He begins animation once part of the storyboard is ready, then continues drawing the storyboard as production progresses.

Especially since Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away, people have often complained that his stories are muddled or lack coherence.

Miyazaki himself surely knows this better than anyone.

With that in mind, the Granduncle’s stones, always on the verge of falling, could express the precariousness of the films Miyazaki has made.

On this reading, the Granduncle is another alter ego of Hayao Miyazaki—the second in the film.

The argument for the Granduncle as Miyazaki’s alter ego may still be weak. But the mysterious meteorite that drove him mad might give it more weight.

The Meteorite: The Spark of Creation

The mysterious tower has loomed over the story from the beginning. We learn that the Granduncle built it, that its core was a meteorite, and that it drove him mad.

As viewers, we find ourselves asking, ‘Wait—what?’ The revelation that it is a meteorite feels so unexpected.

What matters here, though, is that the Granduncle became so captivated by this mysterious presence that he lost his reason and remained inside it for years and years.

Could that mean the meteorite is animation itself, for Miyazaki? The world inside it would then be the animation world he has created.

The many doors near the end might support this reading. They cross time and space in an instant—just what animation does so well. A moment can stretch out, years can pass in a flash, and a thousand miles can be covered in three steps.

The human-like parakeets shrinking into ordinary birds when they leave also seems to support that reading. The door separates fiction from reality: inside, parakeets can talk and act like people; outside, they become birds again.

Yet The Boy and the Heron complicates matters by adding a world of the dead. The film depicts this quite openly, and Mahito’s mother is there. So the world inside the tower combines:

Those three meanings mingle in one world. This is the kind of ambiguity that makes the film so complicated.

By this point, could we not call the Granduncle an alter ego of Miyazaki as an animation director?

The Meteorite’s Origin

The meteorite’s meaning is one thing, but its sudden arrival from the sky is still hard to accept.

I suspect, though, that the film shows the moment it comes into being.

Near the end, as the Granduncle’s world collapses, the thirteen stones he has stacked fall with it into a space-like expanse. A shooting star crosses the scene.

Perhaps that shooting star is the meteorite that drove the Granduncle mad.

The ominous stone gave him great power, but on this reading it remains within an endless cycle through time. The Granduncle remains within that cycle too.

At the beginning, Mahito has not overcome his mother’s death. In a sense, he is caught in a repeating cycle of his own, and Natsuko’s presence seems to reinforce it.

I think reading the novel How Do You Live?, left for him by his mother, allows Mahito to break out of that cycle and decide to accept Natsuko as his mother. The novel marks a major turning point within the film.

That also explains why a Mahito who has escaped his own cycle would not choose to succeed the Granduncle and shut himself inside another one.

I think that is very well put together.

In this sense, The Boy and the Heron also has elements of a time-travel story.

A Buddy Film: Miyazaki, Suzuki, and Yasuda

The Grey Heron as Producer Toshio Suzuki

If Mahito and the Granduncle are different versions of Miyazaki, and the strange world represents his mind and his creations, one odd figure remains.

The Heron Man.

The Heron Man began as a Grey Heron, so perhaps the Granduncle brought him in as he did the parakeets and pelicans. But that does not quite fit. Those birds become ordinary birds as soon as they leave; the Grey Heron has a personality outside the tower and can lure Mahito into it.

He is clearly different from the other birds. So who is the Grey Heron, or Heron Man?

If Mahito is Miyazaki, then the Grey Heron who accompanies and supports him could be… Toshio Suzuki.

Suzuki knew Miyazaki and Takahata before Ghibli was founded and kept making animation with them. Perhaps that relationship appears here as the Heron Man.

Come to think of it, The Boy and the Heron is a buddy film, something Miyazaki has not made for a long time, since The Castle of Cagliostro. The Heron begins by misleading Mahito, but becomes a good companion who supports him.

If the strange world is Miyazaki’s creative world, their journey could express the journey he and Suzuki have taken together. In this sense too, I think the world inside the tower is Miyazaki’s inner world.

Kiriko as Color Designer Michiyo Yasuda

The buddy-film perspective also gives me a little sense of what another particularly puzzling character might mean.

The fierce fisherwoman, Kiriko.

She appears as an old woman, then somehow as a vigorous young woman, using mysterious magic to help Mahito.

I wonder whether Kiriko represents color designer Michiyo Yasuda, who died in October 2016. The evidence for this is extremely thin. What do you think?

Time Travel and a Puzzling Timeline

Himi and Kiriko

At the end, Himi and Kiriko return through a door into the past, and Himi chooses the path that will make her Mahito’s mother.

Meeting his mother in the past plainly brings time travel into the story. But it happens in a world where time and space mingle so strangely that the events become even harder to grasp.

An Asahi Shimbun article about Miyazaki, the new film, and Genzaburo Yoshino reports that after the first screening Miyazaki said: ‘You probably found it hard to understand. There were parts I did not understand myself.’ Personally, I think he meant the timeline around here, not the overall storytelling.

Here is my attempt to put the timeline together:

His mother seems to have entered the tower long ago. If the Granduncle is still alive there, this would mean time passes much more slowly in that world than in reality.

How does that sound? Of course there will be objections! Especially to my handling of Kiriko. I do not think a thousand years of thought would explain why she had the same scar as Mahito.

But remember: the things we can understand are physical phenomena that can actually occur. The Granduncle’s world and time travel do not exist in reality, so perhaps it is only natural that we cannot make sense of them.

We have wandered into a wonderfully incomprehensible fantasy world made by Miyazaki. Isn’t that what fiction is?

What Happened to the Mother’s Body?

The Grey Heron tells Mahito that he has not seen his mother’s body. That seems to be true: he has not experienced her death by seeing her remains.

There are two possibilities for this:

Normally, we would assume the first. It would be entirely understandable for his father to think showing a burned body to a child was too cruel.

But if she had acquired the power of fire in the strange world, the second possibility is conceivable too.

Suppose Himi loses her memory of meeting Mahito when she returns. At her death, surrounded by flames, she might regain that memory and the power of fire, becoming a fire spirit that protects him.

That might explain his dreamlike vision of his mother wrapped in flames.

We might even say that his mother gained the power of fire after being spirited away because, having become a fire spirit, she went into that world with Mahito.

See? It makes no sense.

It is irresponsible to write all this and then say it makes no sense, but I hope some of the feeling comes across. Dropping my almost baseless insistence that she protected Mahito as a fire spirit would remove at least this particular confusion. Still, in the world of The Boy and the Heron—or at least the Granduncle’s world—cause and effect do not seem to follow the usual timeline.

I suspect this temporal coherence is what Miyazaki meant when he said he did not understand parts of it.

The Mysterious Shrine

When Mahito enters the world below, the first thing he sees is an eerie, mysterious shrine. Something inside apparently needs to be appeased through prayer.

If this is Miyazaki’s inner world and animation world, perhaps the shrine contains some murky part of himself that he still has not put into his work.

Making a work means exposing yourself in some way. But exposing everything inside you would not make entertainment; it might not be fit to show people at all.

You cannot make a work without revealing yourself, but reveal too much and it falls apart.

Perhaps Miyazaki has put something of himself into his films along that fine line, while remaining aware of something he has kept back. That something sleeps inside the shrine. Praying to appease it could be a declaration: ‘I’m not putting this one in the film either!’

Yet what he thinks he has hidden may differ greatly from what remains hidden. Perhaps we have received something Miyazaki believes he has kept to himself.

Mahito’s Decision: Miyazaki’s First Message

If the Granduncle is Miyazaki as an animation director, his final conversation with Mahito is a conversation with himself.

The Granduncle asks Mahito to stack stones and carry on his work. Mahito refuses, saying they are cold stones, not warm wood. The world the Granduncle loved then collapses. What might that scene mean?

If that world is the animation Miyazaki has created, Mahito is calling it cold stones.

The film also associates the stones with “malice,” the idea Mahito uses to describe the scar he gave himself. I compare these lines and their English translations in my collection of memorable The Boy and the Heron quotes.

What makes it cold?

Miyazaki’s films have fascinated many people, myself included, but their production is unusual. Beyond the storyboard process mentioned earlier, his corrections to the animators’ key drawings can be quite severe.

Originally a brilliant animator himself, Miyazaki looks through every key drawing and corrects it by hand. The animation director has to understand his intentions and clean up his rough drawings.

The corrections are ruthless. Drawings made with great effort are repeatedly discarded and replaced.

In short, he wants to draw everything himself, but cannot, so he has to use other people. At least, that is how it might look from the outside.

What keeps a production like this together is that Miyazaki’s corrections are, in the end, exceptionally good.

Not every animator necessarily thought the corrected version was better, though. Plenty probably punched Miyazaki out in their minds.

In Ghibli Textbook 9: Whisper of the Heart(ジブリの教科書9 耳をすませば, in Japanese), animator Kitaro Kosaka discusses director Yoshifumi Kondo’s animation checks:

Kondo’s checks have two stages. When the key animation comes in, he first corrects only the characters. The shot then goes to the in-between animators with the acting unchecked, and he checks the acting for the first time once the in-betweens are done. The key animator’s effort is rarely wasted entirely, as it is in Miyazaki’s checks, but this method is also very risky…

(Original Text in Japanese)
近藤さんのチェックは二段階なんです。原画が上がってくると、まずキャラクターだけを直すんです。ですから芝居はノーチェックのままそのカットが動画スタッフにまわり、動画が上がってきたときに初めて芝居をチェックします。宮崎さんのチェックのように原画マンの労力が全く無駄になるということは少ないのですが、このやり方はリスクも大きく・・・

Unlike Miyazaki films, where drawings are redone from scratch, I think this was a film key animators could work on freely, without feeling too intimidated…

(Original Text in Japanese)
一から直されてしまう宮崎監督作品とは異なり、現我慢にとってはあまり畏縮せずにのびのびと参加できた作品だったと思いますし・・・

Even for excellent animators, working on a Miyazaki film seems to have been demanding.

It also matters that, for most of his films, one person—Miyazaki—provides the original story, screenplay, storyboards, and direction.

That is remarkable. But when he even corrects the key drawings himself, we could also call his films a closed world made by the person Hayao Miyazaki.

I suspect this peculiar severity, and that closed world, are why the Granduncle’s creation is called cold stones.

On that reading, the ending is Miyazaki’s decisive rejection of his own world. Yet Mahito rejects cold stones; warm wood would be another matter.

Mahito remembering what happened inside the tower matters too. He has been spirited away, and the usual expectation is that someone who returns loses those memories.

But the piece of stone in his pocket lets him keep them.

Taken together, could the ending be a declaration that ‘I will not forget what I have made, but I will make animation—or take part in making it—in a different way’? Given his age, this may be hard to believe, but it does not seem so strange after the ideas explored above.

The Granduncle’s insistence that only a blood relation can succeed him suggests a more complicated ending, however.

Let’s bring Mahito’s father back into the discussion.

Mahito’s Father: Miyazaki’s Second Message

For now, we can read Mahito as Miyazaki and his father as Miyazaki’s father, Katsuji. But the final scene suggests a more layered picture.

Miyazaki is the second of four brothers, whereas Mahito ends the film as the elder of two siblings. He might gain more siblings later, of course, but being the elder rather than the younger brother is a considerable difference.

The family of four in the last scene, combined with the Granduncle’s words, makes me wonder whether Goro Miyazaki is also projected onto Mahito, and Hayao himself onto Mahito’s father. Hayao’s family has four members, including two sons.

This is what makes the film so tangled: several elements inhabit one figure, changing between scenes or existing together.

From this perspective, the conversation with the Granduncle and what follows can be read as a message from Hayao Miyazaki to his son Goro.

To consider that message, we need to go a little further. Putting it in writing makes it even more complicated.

In the conversation, both Hayao and Goro are projected onto Mahito. His choice of the world outside, and his return to the Miyazaki family, could express a wish for Goro to venture into a world unlike Hayao’s. At the same time, Hayao, who has been Mahito, steps into the world of being Mahito’s father.

Including the stone Mahito brings back, I would read the message as: ‘Goro, we have had our problems, but I want you to keep making animation. You should not make it in the same way I do—and you have been working differently already. But please do not forget my knowledge and techniques. I will support you as your father.’

What he wants Goro to keep making need not be animation. It could mean work particular to Goro, such as overseeing Ghibli Park.

The promise of support as a father reminds me of Miyazaki openly praising Earwig and the Witch.

The interview was released in 2021; even if recorded earlier, it was during production of The Boy and the Heron. For someone familiar with his behavior in the documentary about From Up on Poppy Hill, that unreserved praise felt a little strange.

After seeing The Boy and the Heron, though, I can read the interview as another expression of supporting his son as a father.

With some wishful thinking of my own, I wonder whether Hayao and Goro will collaborate again. If so, the choice to broadcast From Up on Poppy Hill on Friday Road Show on July 14, 2023, the film’s release date, seems to take on meaning too.

In any case, I think The Boy and the Heron can be read as a declaration of support for his son and a return to fatherhood.

Those are the thoughts The Boy and the Heron prompted in me. They have become rather long-winded, so let’s summarize.

The Boy and the Heron: Summary and Impressions

Putting the Readings Together

The Boy and the Heron is complicated rather than simply difficult. The world inside the tower, Mahito, his father, and the Granduncle carry several meanings, which shift freely from scene to scene.

In my reading, the world inside the tower represents:

As for Mahito, his father, and the Granduncle:

Hayao’s father may be subtly projected onto the Granduncle too. Within this tangled structure, I see two themes:

With these themes, Miyazaki’s severe production methods, the stacked stones, the conversation, and the collapsing tower in mind, I read two possible messages:

Given his age, I do not know how much longer Miyazaki can make animation. But The Boy and the Heron made me feel that he has no intention of giving it up. I admit there is plenty of wishful thinking in that.

---

Enough of my lofty ‘analysis.’ From here, I want to give my straightforward personal impressions.

The Joy and Confusion of Seeing It Blind

What stood out about The Boy and the Heron was the lack of publicity. Suzuki had said it was a fantasy, but apart from that, all we had was the key visual.

Since The Wind Rises had so little fantasy, Mahito entering the tower thrilled me: ‘Ah! Miyazaki’s fantasy world is open again! This is it! I’ve been waiting for this!’

Yet the journey into a strange world unmistakably recalled Spirited Away, what followed recalled earlier Miyazaki films, and the ending was ‘Balse’—the destruction spell from Castle in the Sky.

I couldn’t help but think of at least Castle in the Sky, Spirited Away, Ponyo, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises.

I was a little unsure how to take what I was seeing. At the same time, some elements seemed deliberately borrowed from earlier Miyazaki films.

Like many viewers, I think, I felt both fresh excitement and honest confusion on that first viewing.

I also wanted to write about it on my blog, so this article grew out of several days of thought after seeing it in the cinema. It may be a little fanciful, but I do not think it is too far off.

The Scary, Scary Stepmother Natsuko

The most forceful scene in The Boy and the Heron was probably Natsuko screaming ‘I hate you!’ at Mahito.

What matters, though, is less the scene’s intensity than the fact that we have already sensed something of those feelings throughout the story.

The moment that fixed this impression in my mind was Natsuko taking Mahito’s hand and pressing it to her stomach.

To me, the scene declares war on a child: ‘Your father is no longer yours. He belongs to me and this baby!’

Perhaps feeling she had gone too far, she later showed concern for Mahito, at least on the surface.

She may seem rather cruel. But accepting another person’s child as your own is probably not easy, and the same goes for the child accepting a new mother. I was glad they ultimately came through the conflict with a stronger relationship.

Mahito’s Malice

The first bewildering scene is probably Mahito striking his own head with a stone and bleeding an astonishing amount.

He calls the resulting scar proof of malice. I imagine the malice might mean something like:

But more than the meaning of malice, what mattered to me was seeing all that blood and realizing, ‘Oh, this is a film I’m going to have to think hard about!’

Of course, part of that was my own odd tension at watching the master’s much-anticipated new film.

The Immortal Miyazaki Humor

What moved me most in The Boy and the Heron may have been Miyazaki’s undying sense of humor.

Many films—not just animated ones—include comic scenes as little interludes. Personally, I feel 99.9% of them fall flat.

Miyazaki, on the other hand, always makes me chuckle at just the right moment. He even slipped such a scene into Princess Mononoke.

One highlight of The Boy and the Heron may be the adjustment of the wooden piece Mahito makes to fill the hole in the Heron’s beak. The timing was wonderfully funny.

There are other beautifully timed moments too: the effort spent animating Mahito backing away on all fours, or his father crying, ‘Mahito’s turned into a budgerigar!’ I chuckled at every one.

Humor is personal, of course. Some people may feel exactly the opposite and find Miyazaki’s humor unbearable. But I was very happy to see that it was still alive.

Perhaps my biggest laugh came when Genzaburo Yoshino’s novel How Do You Live? appeared as that very novel. This has nothing to do with Miyazaki’s humor: I laughed in admiration, thinking, ‘So that’s how you do it!’ Perhaps a master like Miyazaki is allowed to borrow a novel’s title simply by putting the book in his film. What a bold move.

That’s all for now!

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About the author

Sifr

Independent film writer based in Japan

Sifr writes in-depth film analysis for SifrInsight, focusing on character motivations, themes, symbolism, memorable scenes, and the details that are easy to miss on a first viewing.

The aim is to go beyond simple plot summaries and explain how a film’s characters, themes, and story choices fit together.

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