‘The Boy and the Heron’ review: Miyazaki’s fantastic fable carries a great sadness

“The Boy and the Heron” immerses us in the kind of vivid, fiercely imagined fantasy world we’ve come to expect from Hayao Miyazaki: a ghostly waterworld populated by pirate ships, man-eating birds and soft, pillowy creatures called warawara that will undoubtedly adorn Studio Ghibli merchandise for decades.

But the 82-year-old Japanese master’s animation creates another world no less vivid: real-life Japan during World War II, through which the film’s 12-year-old hero Mahito Maki travels as he and his father relocate from fire-bombed Tokyo to the countryside.

One of Miyazaki’s strengths is the meticulous wealth of detail he allows in the margins of his frames. Consider his 2001 masterpiece “Spirited Away,” in which nearly every frame was filled with gods and spirits of every shape and size, or 2008’s “Ponyo,” whose flooded world was occupied by all manner of spellbinding sea creatures.

In the opening scenes of “The Boy and the Heron,” Miyazaki pays the same attention to the faces of the people around Mahito, all of which reflect great weariness and sad knowledge. As Mahito, voiced by Luca Padovan in English and Soma Santoki in Japanese, rides trains filled with evacuees and traverses bombed-out landscapes occupied by emaciated street people, we begin to wonder about these peripheral, sketched-in people and their stories.

Mahito himself carries a great burden. He lost his mother in a bombing, and his father has now married her sister with unseemly haste. Mahito is the most tortured and withdrawn of Miyazaki’s heroes, and he hardly says a word during the film’s first third except when addressing his stepmother with formal courtesy.

Mahito’s father owns a factory in the countryside, and they live in a grand country house along with Mahito’s sedate grandfather and a gaggle of ancient maids who slink about on bodies much too small for their enormous heads. In a time of scarcity and need, Mahito’s schoolmates and local workers resent his relative privilege as the son of a wealthy industrialist, and in an astonishing sequence, Mahito smashes a rock into his own head to exempt himself from further bullying at school.

These early scenes are so vividly drawn we may almost forget about the film’s supernatural element, which comes in the form of an eerily man-like heron who comes pecking around Mahito’s window.

It takes longer than in “Spirited Away” or “My Neighbor Totoro” for Mahito to cross over to the spirit realm, which he reacts to pragmatically. Mahito is too traumatized to express much interest in a portal to another universe, and the film retains its funereal tone throughout; even Miyazaki’s trademark flying scenes feel burdened, with the heron-man beating his wings relentlessly to keep his heavy form aloft.

The second half of “The Boy and the Heron” contains some of Miyazaki’s most fantastical and baroque images — images one is grateful to have seen, like an endless parade of ghost ships sailing beneath shafts of light that burst violently through the clouds, or a lengthy vertical pan through a castle populated by thousands of brightly colored, beady-eyed parakeet-men.

Some of these images seem to carry over from Miyazaki’s past work. A way station between worlds, bathed in sad autumnal light, suggests one from “Spirited Away.” The ghost ships mirror the airplanes ascending to heaven in “Porco Rosso.” The satoyama landscapes, where flat farmland meets forested foothills, seem just a stone’s throw from those in “My Neighbor Totoro.”

Miyazaki has allowed autobiographical details to slip into this film — he also lost his mother at an early age, evacuated from the city to the country during the war and had a father involved in airplane manufacturing. A scene in which hundreds of workers parade through the satoyama, prototype airplane cockpits hoisted over their shoulders, hearkens back to both “The Wind Rises” and a shot from “Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind” in which the heroine carries an insect’s giant eye on her back. Could these two scenes derive from the same childhood memory?

Yet if the imagery in “The Boy and the Heron” sometimes feels familiar, the tone does not. There’s more blood than in any Miyazaki film since 1997’s “Princess Mononoke,” and even the adorable warawara are used as counterpoint to the graphic butchering of a fish. No one seems to be having much of a good time except the grannies, who liven up their routine lives with tobacco and gossip, and the portly little heron-man, whose comic relief provides a splash of levity amid such a drab world. Joe Hisaishi’s score is more minimal than usual, and his piano chords descend with great gravity, eschewing the orchestral uplift he usually uses to punch up Miyazaki’s most splendid images.

The American title “The Boy and the Heron” makes the film seem more like a fairytale than it is; the Japanese title, more poetic and appropriate, is “How Do You Live?” Finding the will to live in a violent world is a favorite theme of Miyazaki’s, previously embodied in pacifist heroes like Nausicaä, here expressed through a child’s heart enduring the kind of pain it should never have to bear. At the end of the film, Mahito has learned to live with his burden, and yet we suspect he will carry it for the rest of his life — and that he may grow up to become someone as pessimistic and stupefyingly creative as Miyazaki.

‘The Boy and the Heron’

Stars (out of four): 3.5 stars

Runtime: 2 hours, 4 minutes

Rated: PG-13 (for some violent content/bloody images and smoking)

How to watch: In theaters