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“The Boy and the Heron” * (2023, GKids/Shout! Factory) Elegiac feature, in all senses of the word, from Studio Ghibli chief Hayao Miyazaki, who has reportedly capped his remarkable animation career with this Oscar-winning fable. Making sense of the past is again the framework for Miyazaki: here, it’s young Mahito echoing the director’s childhood through his evacuation from Tokyo during WWII, though Mahito also suffers the loss of his mother in the conflict. Transported to a rural estate where his new mother (his birth mother’s sister) and local schoolkids offer additional alienation, Mahito finds an outlet in a large, talking heron (with the voice of Robert Pattinson in the English dub) and a mysterious tower built by his long-vanished uncle (Mark Hamill). The world inside the tower – a typically spectacular Ghibli fantasy-scape, populated by spirits and otherworldly creatures – allows Miyazaki to address a panoply of emotions (grief, loss, militarism, ecological decline), though his thoughts on these issues are occasionally obscured by a seemingly endless stream of new plot points and character arcs, though that may be the the point: life is messy and difficult to resolve, and what we are able to extract from the chaos offers some solace and hope, if not a clear-cut answer. The GKids/Shout set – a 4K/Blu-ray combo – offers both the Japanese and English-language dubs (the latter featuring the voices of Florence Pugh, Christian Bale, Willem Dafoe and Dave Bautista), as well as interviews with composer Joe Hisashi, animation supervisor Takeshia Honda, and various promotional items.
