by When Hayao Miyazaki pitched “The Boy and the Heron” (GKids, in select theaters LA and NYC) to Studio Ghibli co-founder/producer Toshio Suzuki in 2016, he asked permission to make the story his own. This surprised Suzuki – his friend of almost 40 years at the time -; the legendary anime director is not known for being so personal. And yet this fit perfectly with the notion that Ghibli films are aimed at reviving memories.
“I agree that it’s Miyazaki’s most personal film because of what he told me,” Suzuki told IndieWire via Zoom through an interpreter. “The Boy and the Hero” is not only inspired by Miyazaki’s childhood (he suffered the Japanese firebombing during World War II and his father was the director of the family’s aircraft manufacturing factory), but also his career at Ghibli with his two closest friends: studio co-founder/director Isao Takahata (“Grave of the Fireflies”) and Suzuki.
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“Miyazaki is Mahito [the 12-year-old protagonist voiced by Luca Padovan in the English-language version]Takahata is the great uncle [voiced by Mark Hamill]and the odd grey [voiced by Robert Pattinson] yes with me,” Suzuki added. “So I asked him why. He said [Takahata] he discovered his talents and added him to the team. I think it was Takahata san who helped him develop his abilities. On the other hand, the relationship between the boy and the [heron] it is a relationship in which they will not yield to each other, neither push nor pull.”
All in all, it’s a lot to unpack: Miyazaki came out of retirement for a second time after “The Wind Rises” (2013) to make his 12th feature — the semi-autobiographical, hand-drawn fantasy for his grandchildren. It’s about destruction, loss, and rebuilding a better future through imagination, inspired by the novel he loved as a child (“How Do You Live?”).
Mahito loses his mother in the firebombing of Japan and relocates to the countryside, where his father (voiced by Christian Bale), who runs an air munitions factory, marries his sister-in-law, Natsuko (voiced by Gemma Chan). Traumatized, angry, and confused, the boy encounters a talking crow (part bird, part man), who tells him that his mother is still alive and leads him to the afterlife in a magical tower shared by the living and the dead. dead There he meets his great-uncle, the architect of the tower, and is reunited with his mother (voiced by Karen Fukuhara) and Natsuko.
At first, Suzuki resisted greenlighting “The Boy and the Heron” because of Miyazaki’s age (he is 82) and the high cost (arguably the most expensive film in Japan but he made equal nearly $80 million at the domestic box office) . However, Miyazaki overcame his opposition with his enthusiasm and remarkable programming. The film took seven years to complete, and Suzuki had to hire some of Japan’s most talented animators outside of Ghibli to handle the task (including supervising animator Takeshi Honda of “Neon” fame Genesis Evangelion”). With diminished stamina and failing eyesight, Miyazaki was unable to oversee production in the same way as he had at the height of his creative powers and relied on Honda to draw, re-draw and revise. do under strict advice.
But with the death of Takahata in 20018, a badly affected Miyazaki was forced to reduce the role of the great uncle in the story, who had previously been more central in the boy’s life. “After Takahata died, he couldn’t continue with that story, so he changed the story and it became a relationship between the boy and the Heron,” continued Suzuki. “And in his own mind, at first, the Heron was something that symbolizes the humor of the mansion and that tower, even ominous, to which he goes during the time of war. But it changed into this kind of friendship between the boy and the Heron.”
Miyazaki first considered exploring the theme of friendship in “The Wind Rises” (inspired by real-life fighter design engineer Jiro Horikoshi during World War II) before abandoning it. “So, this time around, when the Heron became the center of the story, and it matched the storyboards, I was careful not to make it look bad on me,” Suzuki said. “Having said that, I’ve known Miyazaki for 45 years. I remember everything about him. There are things that I just don’t know. There are things that only the two of us know. And he remembers all these little details, which really impressed me.”
For example, when Mahito and the Heron sit and chat at the house of Kiriko (voiced by Florence Pugh), a younger sea version of one of the old mornings, it is a recreation of how Miyazaki and Suzuki would meet. “Where we have our meetings, where we have our conversation is his studio, his restaurant,” he said. “And he has such a big table, but we don’t sit in front of each other, we sit next to each other, and we don’t look at each other when we talk. And what we discussed was very similar.”
During production, Suzuki became impatient to see the new storyboards with the old uncle. It seemed that Miyazaki was deliberately stalling when she was crying about Takahata. “My question was: ‘So, when is the big uncle going to show up?'” Suzuki said. “He built this great character, but it doesn’t show up in the storyboards he would bring me. But it took about a year after Takahata’s death that he was able to draw that character into the storyboards in the second half of the story.
“And what surprised me the most was when I saw the storyboard where his great uncle asked Mahito to continue this work, this legacy, and he says no – he refuses the offer . Miyazaki was someone who followed Takahata’s path all those years, and I thought it was a huge thing for him [to follow a different path].”
Meanwhile, Suzuki confirmed that Miyazaki has not retired. The film has given the director renewed confidence to continue working on other stories. However, Miyazaki can’t focus on new ideas while “The Boy and the Heron” is still in theaters. “He has to empty his mind again,” Suzuki said, “and then when his mind is empty with a blank canvas, he tends to have new ideas. So we have to wait a little more.”
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