The Boy and the Heron (Hayao Miyazaki, 2023)

[yoloswegmaster]

Ghibli has announced that there won't be any trailers, stills, or new posters for the new Miyazaki film before its July premiere date in Japan. It's also been confirmed to be 125 minutes long.

[yoloswegmaster]

Trailer for The Boy and the Heron

[yoloswegmaster]

The voice cast for the English dubbed version of The Boy and the Heron:

The dubbed version of the film will feature the voices of Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson and Florence Pugh. Also featured Luca Padovan, Mamoudou Athie, Tony Revolori and Dan Stevens.

Can't wait to rewatch this.

[therewillbeblus]

The Boy and the Heron is a decently-strong reminder of what makes Miyazaki's films feel singularly imaginative to his fans, even if it's basically a lite retread of Spirited Away's youth-enters-fantasy-world narrative. Miyazaki admirably eschews many opportunities to linger on sentimentality during this outing, which leads to an ending that I found deeply affecting in its mature restraint.

SpoilerShow

The final shots, quickly jumping in time a couple years as the family physically moves on, is a wise meditation on the fleeting significance of things - the lingering shot of the room after Mahito nonchalantly exits gave me chills.

As an audience, we crave the artist coating a layer of sentimentality onto this moment to drum up the significance of the cumulative emotions we've just been ushered to experience - but it's just there, and gone. Miyazaki’s lucid pronouncement of the introverted value yet impermanence of all meaningful experience is both an expression of the inherent loneliness and compromised existential catharses momentarily found in sharing experiences. It’s a great, concise, poignant swan song message to close the book on an illustrious career of wide-eyed meaning-seeking and emotional consumption.

[hearthesilence]

They screened the Japanese-language/English-subtitled version today at MoMA. I went in virtually fresh, knowing the original Japanese title referenced a popular book that's more or less a staple of youth literature in Japan, but the film is a completely new work. (The book appears in one scene.) I really enjoyed it - I was surprised at how much of this was likely drawn from Miyazaki's own life, and it follows in that great tradition of children/teenagers grappling with the horrors of the real world and perhaps their own personal lives through fantastical elements that reflect or suggest that real-life turmoil.

[Mr Sausage]

The Boy and the Heron...

...is not an especially good movie. It gets better as it goes along, and there are sections that generate that wonder and enchantment Miyazaki is so good at. But so much of the movie sits lifeless on the screen. Part of it comes from the movie being assembled out of other, better Ghibli films. The other part is that Miyazaki has seemingly lost his ability to create character. The movie hinges on a young boy who has no personality. He's upright, duty-bound, and thoroughly repressed when the movie starts, responding to every situation with the same stiff upper lip. I assumed the movie would show this facade cracking to reveal his emotions, but oddly it never does. He's the same way all through. And this is a problem because his actions don't make much sense otherwise. He's clearly in an fraught social situation, what with being uprooted into a strange village with a pregnant stepmother he's only just met. He gives us no glimpse of his real feelings, but you can infer a lot from his silences and excessive formality. So when his stepmother disappears and he charges after her without a second thought, spending the movie on an unwavering quest to find her, it's confusing. Why is he doing this? The movie suggests his feelings for her are at best ambivalent. So why pursue her with the same zeal you'd expect if he were pursuing, say, his mother? Is there a repressed, unadmitted love or respect for her? Is it simple duty to his father, her husband? It's impossible to say (and the movie's mixing up of mom and stepmom at points didn't help). The movie never develops his character; hell, it never sufficiently explains him.

Without proper emotional backbone to drive the story it just sits there on the screen, pretty but uninvolving. It reminded me of Jiro in The Wind Rises, another very proper and upright persona with an unerring sense of duty and a confidence in his actions, but who Miyazaki also failed to bring to life. The kid here seems more like an ideal, the model Japanese schoolboy, tough, disciplined, self-reliant, dutiful, respectful, self-sacrificing, blah, blah, blah. Miyazaki has replaced character with unpleasant idealizations. There are some nightmares meant to do the heavy lifting of making that bond with the audience, but they can't do it alone. There ought to be a real, developing personality there.

For most of his career, Miyazaki preferred not to address specific socio-political situations, instead leaving things more general and ambiguous. He either put his socio-political themes in outright fantasy worlds like in Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke, or he opted for Europe pastiches with no identifiable history: Howl's Moving Castle's vague European nation with its non-specific war that could be any 20th century war, allowing Miyazaki to use the imagery of the two World Wars for effect without having to address them directly. Or Kiki's Delivery Service, which seems to take place in a Europe unscarred by WWII. The exceptions are Porco Rosso, The Wind Rises, and now The Boy and the Heron. Porco Rosso took place in fascist Italy just before WWII, but aside from a sequence or two, preferred its more fantastical narrative of air combat between dastardly pirates and a Red Baron refigured as a heroic pig. The Wind Rises tackled WWII more directly and specifically, but Miyazaki showed such caution and reticence that he ended up with a bundle of conflicting notions he didn't know what to do with.

The Boy with the Heron is more like Porco Rosso. It has a specific cultural and historical setting, Japan nearing the end of WWII. But the setting is there only to bookend and lend some urgency to a story with far more general themes. WWII is standing in for the more general chaos and uncertainty of our shared reality. The fantasy realm adjacent to our reality seems to reflect this given that its stability comes from a precarious, ad hoc assemblage of magic stones concocted by an old caretaker. There's meant to be a choice: between assembling a more beautiful, more properly ordered fantasy universe (a vaguely fascist notion now that I write it out) and abandoning the fantasy realm to rejoin the uncertainties of a world that we know is about to be engulfed in flame. But this doesn't seem like much of a choice, because of course the fantasy world is disordered by its own militarism. And here we see Miyazaki's nervous reticence again, as he is seemingly comfortable addressing Japanese militarism only in the context of an army of gigantic parakeets, not, you know, the actual Japanese army we see briefly in the beginning. And even there he's unable to find much to say, because this avian military with its (evil?) general is introduced only at the climax. They're in and out so quickly that there's no way to develop them or draw anything but the most broad ideas from them. It's very sloppy.

It's hard not to miss that the narrative of the movie involves successive retreats from wartime reality. The movie begins with a great conflagration that kills the boy's mother (we're meant to infer that this was a bombing, but the movie is not specific), but from there the main characters retreat from the wartorn city to the placid countryside. Even there, the effects of war are felt, especially at the boy's new school, which seems filled with hardened rural boys who mostly join the volunteer war effort. So the boy contrives a way to get excused from school, which his father agrees to and uses his comfy, bourgeouis position to effect. His father is a factory bigwig who produces fighter plane parts, but the only time we see this is when the cockpit windows are being loaded on top of this beautiful shrine or something on a hill so that the boy and us can contemplate these glass housings in isolation, beautiful objects detached from their eventual use. There's a lot of avoidance and escape built into the movie, more than the movie can actually deal with given that its fantasy realm, the one the boy eventually repudiates, is never a legitimate option. More even than the other movies, I get the impression of an artist who is deeply concerned with war and human cruelty, but who is unable to bring himself to truly look at it with unblinking eyes. War horrifies him, and in his horror he draws back.

Miyazaki is a genuine artist who has produced some undeniable masterpieces. His body of work is estimable. But he exhausted something with Spirited Away, something he just hasn't been able to recapture in the films since. And even tho' he chose to play it safe and give everyone a vintage Miyazaki experience culled from his previous hits, all he's done is produce a limp, unambitious movie that here and there shows glimpses of the man's greatness before falling flat once again.

[Michael Kerpan]

I will watch this new Miyazaki film, but I have expected it to be "less than fully satisfactory". Partly this is Miyazaki, and partly I think it is me. I miss Takahata.

[Mr Sausage]

The Boy and the Heron seems to be #1 at the box office right now, with Godzilla Minus 1 close behind it. While it's surprising and heartening to see two foreign films, let alone Japanese films, top the North American box office--neither are any good!

I wish Kore-eda's Monster was the one everyone was rushing to see, but domestic dramas just can't compete with anime and kaiju.

[Michael Kerpan]

Hoping Monster will show up here in Boston one of these weeks....

I assume Miyazaki's new film LOOKS lovely. If so, I would hesitate to say it is "not any good". Wind Rises and Ponyo were both nice to look at, even if the content was a wash-out for me in both cases.

[Mr Sausage]

The Boy and the Heron seems to be #1 at the box office right now, with Godzilla Minus 1 close behind it. While it's surprising and heartening to see two foreign films, let alone Japanese films, top the North American box office--neither are any good!

What's wrong with Godzilla Minus One?

Like a lot of very sincere, very earnest movies, it’s a pile of schmaltz. Trite, manipulative, eye rolling.

Michael: the Miyazaki looks just beautiful. When I said “isn’t any good” I didn’t mean “is devoid of worth”. It has some nice stuff here and there, just not enough to distract from all the bad.

[Yakushima]

Mr Sausage, I am sorry The Boy and the Heron did not quite work for you. However, I disagree with many of your observations.
To me, this is a grand masterpiece, an utter perfection of a film. It is even more uncompromising than Miyazaki's previous works; his approach to the story, images, and especially to music is often austere here. The film carries the weight of his years. In a way, this is a film about aging, and approaching the end of existence.
A metaphor of the world where the dead greatly outnumber the living is very transparent to those who are blessed with longer lives.
But it would not be Miyazaki's film if it did not have a captivating story, awesome characters, and visual inventiveness far beyond of what his peers are capable of. And quite a few humorous moments too!
This film is a hugely enjoyable trip. Both my wife and I had a blast, and we already bought tickets to watch it again, while it is still playing in IMAX. To everyone on this board - do yourself a favor and see it for yourself in the best possible format. I bet you won't regret it.

[hearthesilence]

A metaphor of the world where the dead greatly outnumber the living is very transparent to those who are blessed with longer lives.

I posted briefly weeks ago, but I liked his latest film quite a bit myself, and details like this really lingered for me. I was mindful of the past controversies of how Japan is portrayed by Miyazaki during WWII, but I thought what he did here was very potent, especially when the context is tied to the perspective of a child from that time. (Though it's not an autobiographical film, the film's setup aligns the character's personal background with Miyazaki's, even though in real life Miyazaki was born in 1941.) He isn't necessarily going to be a precocious kid who can understand what his country is doing, but he's aware of the cost and destruction of the war, as well as the terrible and confusing morality that would make such a world possible. I thought all of those things manifested themselves in this fantasy world he discovers, and even if it's not completely his own imagination, it does reflect back everything he's been witnessing and experiencing, in a way that may even make the loss and the horrors he's been struggling with clearer for him.

[Cde.]

On a literal level the world isn't his imagination, but I think Miyazaki invites you to read it that way and makes the connection to Mahito's unconscious explicit when

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the Heron speaks words from Mahito's dream.

The film is so dense and layered, and I think as people unpack it more it's going to grow a lot in estimation.

[Michael Kerpan]

I'm with Mr S on The Boy and the Heron. I found it a mess in terms of story -- perhaps the most narrative incoherence I've ever encountered in anything ever (and not at all in a fashion that could be viewed as "surrealistic"). There were moments that looked visually lovely -- but I even found the character designs (and Japanese voice performances) relatively unappealing here. I kept glancing at my watch, wondering how much longer this was going to go on. I watched 30-some seasonal anime this past season, some of which were not especially inspired, yet I enjoyed all but a couple of these considerably more than this Miyazaki movie. Sure, even the best of these did not display the sheer technical prowess of this Ghibli film (though some were quite lovely and/or very well animated), but they were rewarding rather than frustrating. (Note: all 3 other family members who went along to the theater, all of whome are long-term Ghibli fans found this mostly pretty disappointing). It's been 20 years since Miyazaki made a film that I loved. And the last few have all been major disappointments, If he does make another film, I think I'll pass.

[Mr Sausage]

One thing I've been thinking on is the film's ending choice between the fantasy world and reality. I found it shallow and pro forma, the kind of thing you toss in when you need your story to add up to some big, important message.

Structurally and narratively, the film hadn't set up this choice. I don't mean didn't properly set it up, I mean it just didn't at all. At the end, the film asserts that it's meaningful for the boy to've chosen the real world and let the fantasy crumble; but at the same time, the real world is largely absent from the movie. The most important real-world incident, the mom's death, is presented in a dream. Immediately after we're in the country-side, and then five minutes later we're at this country manor with its seven comical grannies, uncanny heron, magical tower, and general enfolding of dream and reality. The country manor isn't from reality but the magic of folktales and children's stories. There are two brief views outside the manor's fantasy space: when the boy attends school that one day, sees the children joining the volunteer corps, and picks a fight with a rural boy; and when the boy joins his father on the hill to admire the newly-built cockpits. But after each one we're returned to the liminal zone between fantasy and reality until the story moves into outright fantasy in the second half. When it comes to the real world, the thing behind the boy's momentous decision, we never see it. It holds no narrative weight. The movie is almost entirely storybook fantasy. So the choice is hollow: there is no real world for us to invest in, and no narrative or structural reason for the boy to feel attached to it. The boy's decision to leave the fantasy world is as inexplicable as his decision to enter it in the first place. The movie invests all its emotional and creative energy in the world of the imagination and yet wants to end with a message that, after all, reality is where it's at. What a mess. Miyazaki had nothing to say, so he stumped for the thing it's appropriate for someone to say at the end of their life or career, and without seeming to believe a word of it.

What throws the emptiness of this message into relief is the fact that Takahata did the same thing for his final movie, and did it properly. The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (Ghibli's best film) ends with one of the most moving and genuine paeans to life, and earns it because all through the movie Takahata has engaged directly with the world in all its pains and pleasures, its vapidness and meaning, its kindness and cruelty, its endless dissatisfactions spiced with brief moments of joy. So when Kaguya makes her final plea for life and against transcendence with its sterile eternities, you feel so intensely Takahata's own joy at life, a joy untarnished by idealism or naivety because Takahata has looked carefully at all aspects, good or bad. And at the same time you see Takahata wrestling with and accepting his own impermanence while also urging us to see that here is what matters, not the various realms we would abandon it for. A deeply moving secular vision from a man who loves the world and sees its magic, but knows he must leave it. That's how you do a final statement on the world's beauty.

Miyazaki seems pretty uninterested in the world he forces his boy to choose. He should've just been honest and embraced a Romantic vision of the imagination as a realm of spiritual regeneration ala Gilliam. Instead Miyazaki made a film about how the real world is more preferable in which the real world almost never appears. This kind of thing worked in Spirited Away because, after all, one has to grow up. But the fantasy in this last movie isn't tied to adolescence, it's the opposite: it's tied to apocalypse and paternal destiny for some reason (even more confusing is that the real world is tied both to death and its own apocalypse--who knows what to make of this jumble).

I don't know. I don't want to be uncharitable to the people who liked it, but I half suspect it's Miyazaki's retirement itself that's generating such an outpouring of emotion towards the film, because the film itself is too weakly assembled to do it on its own. I can't imagine anyone feeling especially attached to the real world the film has barely outlined, so I don't see how anyone could much care about the boy's choice.

[Michael Kerpan]

I too was struck by the vast disparity between this film and Takahata's Kaguyahime (my pick for most beautifully animated movie ever).

I honestly have no clue as to what Miyazaki thought he was doing in B&H. None of the characters felt even the tiniest bit "real". The boy's initial indifference to Natsuko and its replacement with devotion to her came out of nowhere. And the other characters were totally ciphers. They all just did whatever Miyazaki decided it would be convenient to do at any given moment. Granted most Miyazaki characters seem pretty static, showing little or no real growth or development, but at least those in his older movies had some semblance of depth, but the ones here are paper thin.

You are right, the "real world" is virtually absent in this film -- but the fantasy world(s) seem thrown together in a pretty willy-nilly fashion -- mostly a random assemblage of things that Miyazaki must have felt would look cool when animated. The more I reflect on this, the more I realize this not something I just "didn't like", it was something, all in all, I actively dis-liked. Sad. I did not have high hopes for this (given Ponyo and Wind Rises), but this fell below even my most pessimistic fears.

[RPG]

I dunno, my mother died when I was a teenager (though not in a fire-bombing!), and retreating into something of a fantasy world while leaving the real world behind seemed pretty spot on for my personal experience. You purposely try to ignore the real world, because all it does is remind you of what you've lost. Then you start to recognize and appreciate everything your lost parent gave you, things you can still hold on to and gain strength from, and you want to re-enter the real world and make something of your life. Even if you don't really know what that means.

This film captured those feelings perfectly for me.

This is about dealing with grief, and finding meaning and silver linings and a reason to live.

That fucking scene where he sees the mirage of his mother, and he knows it's not real, but he has to check anyway because he can't help but find out for certain, just in case somehow it IS real. But he always knows it isn't. And she melts away as soon as he touches her. Holy shit.

I will say that the thing that didn't work for me was his eventual complete acceptance of his aunt as his new mother. Stepmom, maybe, but not mother. But whatever.

[therewillbeblus]

That last piece is heavily cultural, but thanks for lending your personal experience to validate the film's sentimental choices - sometimes sentimentality is appropriate

[Mr Sausage]

I dunno, my mother died when I was a teenager (though not in a fire-bombing!), and retreating into something of a fantasy world while leaving the real world behind seemed pretty spot on for my personal experience. You purposely try to ignore the real world, because all it does is remind you of what you've lost. Then you start to recognize and appreciate everything your lost parent gave you, things you can still hold on to and gain strength from, and you want to re-enter the real world and make something of your life. Even if you don't really know what that means.

Is the film a retreat into fantasy, tho'? The boy charges into the fantasy realm heroically to save someone else, and the fantasy world doesn't seem to accord with any of his fantasies, whatever they might be. Mostly he seems apart from it. And the early attempts of the heron to entice the boy are met with heroic action, eg. crafting the bow. The movie also makes clear these enticements are a part of paternal destiny, not escapism.

If this movie is meant to show a familiar process of embracing fantasy to avoid the miseries of reality, I'd say it has done a bizarre and confusing job. The boy is a heroic male type rather than a dreamer, escapist, or some other passive type. The real world and its troubles are mostly absent from the movie; the most grounded space that gets significant screen time, the manor house and environs, are at best liminal, and I would argue just as much a fantasy world as the crazier realm within the tower. So: there's no balance between dream and reality (it's all dream), the characters are largely stock types better suited for fantasy from the get go, and the messages of the movie are either belied by it ("reality is more important than fantasy" says movie indifferent to reality) or troubling ("tragedies are justified by later positives" says movie set during WWII). The movie is a very pretty shambles.

[knives]

Couldn’t it be though that he’s escaping his feeling of powerlessness by retreating into a fantasy of being heroic?

[therewillbeblus]

Huh, I think it's a very mature approach to the real world, its troubles, and Miyazaki uses the distance between the audience and the boy in a relatively new, less inviting way, but one that is consequently more admirable for the sake of the story.

For this boy, so much happens so fast, or at least that's how the film grammar communicates his feelings at the start. His life is upended, mom dies, he has to move to a new community with a new 'mom' he suddenly needs to somehow respect while also resenting the representation of a replacement, and acclimating to a world in which she has the upper hand of familiarity and comfortability. He copes with social pressures on his first day of school by viciously self-harming, in one of the film's most jarring moments. There's so much going on inside of this kid, who wears anger as a uniform disposition both authentically and as a defense against his inner sadness and emotions and thoughts around loss that are incomprehensible. Is bashing his head in a sign of revolt, a way to momentarily escape/avoid triggers, a self-flagellating intervention to communicate the dissonance between the "Man" this boy feels the mature feelings of and desperately wants to become and the fearful shades of youth, the desire to be taken care of, the core belief that he is morally-branded as unloveable by the heavens, who took away his mother.

I agree that he falls into a mission of "paternal destiny" to save the aunt, but that can still be, and is escapism.. He's bored, lonely, confused, afraid, unfamiliar, and feeling fundamentally disconnected from not just his immediate surroundings but the world itself - so of course this version of fantasy will be bizarre and alienating. I don't think the film follows the exact template you outline: "embracing fantasy to avoid the miseries of reality," but does produce a spin on it. The boy ventures into a realm of fantasy to help issue control and forge a role in response to the miseries of reality. It's actually better that his fantasy isn't a safe haven. Like Spirited Away's also-bizarre and alienating fantasy to its central character, but perhaps a more dream-literate one, aids her in feeling more confident and comfortable in her skin as she emerges through stages of youth and onto a new chapter of life, The Boy and the Heron uses its fantasy world as one to trudge through in order to prove one's dignity and worth as expressed through fabled valor. The difference is this is a boy's story, and so it's a lot thinner, less imaginative, and less emotionally-transparent and unionized with the audience.

Of course in a new milieu, where he's escaping into fantasies on a mission he's incredibly conflicted about to begin with (there's no internal conflict around 'Do I want to get back from my parents/free them from pig-status?' from the admittedly superior Spirited Away). But I think the key is that.. this is the best the boy can do, the best he can think of, to locate a sense of worth in himself. He doesn't seem excited about an adventure - in fact, even this fantastical imaginary friend heron, his last real hope at tapping into childhood and avoiding reality, is something he aggressively moves to extinguish. He shoos away and eventually tries to kill it. The idea that he's prone to avoiding reality with gum-drop comfy escapism just shows a lack of understanding for the character, or really what Miyazaki is trying to communicate about the boy's state of being in that moment. I don't actually think the movie is making those tidy messages or being that didactic at all, really. However, I think Miyazaki can often be better in this mode. His best films are Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, and while I could - and sortof have, albeit one-sided - make an argument that The Boy and the Heron is a more "mature" film in terms of Miyazaki's restraint and rare acknowledgement of a complex psychological and existential path without attempting to fix it, that doesn't mean it doesn't suffer from bloated, disorganized stimuli, a muddled narrative, or just being less interesting simply by being less inviting.

Still, everything builds to that final shot. Nothing is all better, or 'known', or resolved. This was just a pitstop - both significant and insignificant. I think the film does a great job at capturing the significance and insignificance of our narratives and emotional experiences. The boy's suffering and perceptions of what's happening to him are important with absolutism... and they are also impermanent and skewed and will shift with both internal and external influences. I believe the boy goes in to rescue his aunt because it's the only tangible thing he knows how to do in his life, motivated by a cultural prompt that this might just make him feel purpose, a 'part-of' a collective in reality when he returns. That's so incredibly sad, yet relatable for a child without power, so much perception and so much confusion and pain. It's fruitless at meeting those desperate expectations, but when he emerges he may still be a little bit braver, more mature, settled, integrated, etc. Nothing in this movie claims to justify a tragedy, but it does show how we can take our tragedies (*with the objective support and caring gestures of others, a key ingredient) and find silver linings in them. The film also doesn't seem to indicate reality is more important than fantasy - but that our schemas can get a little knotty as we begin to make sense of the world from our own skewed perspectives, that might look like the fantasy of another for all I know. The boy had to engage in fantasy to be ready to show up in reality, and vice versa. The film doesn't "fix" reality for us, but that's not the same thing as being indifferent to it. The boy just isn't at a place where he's going to give us a coda drinking milkshakes and having his first kiss and whatnot - but that fleeting look and acknowledgement of the subjective merits of that room, that will always be with the boy - well, I think that leaves things hopeful as an existential opportunity presented. Not a promise, which would be artificial and false, but an opportunity that reality can and will get a lot better for the boy as he keeps building evidence that he can get through shit and that people will be there for him to help. He no longer needs to reject everyone on instinct, but he's also not in a 180-degree position of being talkative and smiley and the most popular kid soaking up the pleasures of life.

[Mr Sausage]

Couldn’t it be though that he’s escaping his feeling of powerlessness by retreating into a fantasy of being heroic?

The movie isn’t Brazil. He’s not retreating into fantasy heroism, he’s just being heroic.

[knives]

I can’t quite parse the difference.

[therewillbeblus]

Same - are you refuting that the boy is engaging in heroism as a last-resort tangible fantasy to reclaim a sense of personal stability? Nothing about the harsh yet alienating setup sings "he's just being heroic" to me, but I laid out a bunch of reasons why above, so I'm curious how you see Miyazaki's setup and the observant psychology we're being presented with (deliberately if frustratingly distanced, of course). My understanding - which might totally be off-base and I apologize if so - is that you're claiming the film is making a very simplified, knowing statement and is thus not complex, whereas I acknowledge that it's more just unnecessarily complicated than complex, but Miyazaki recognizes so much complexity is occurring in spaces he can't respectfully reach, and he's finally decided to just let that 'be' - at least in comparison to his intrusive bow-tying anxieties (or maybe the guy just liked to end stories thoroughly) coming to fruition in past projects.

I wouldn't rank this very highly in Miyazaki's filmography. It's not his most compelling, has an adventure that loosely drifts between disorganized and illuminating under an internal logic, but the vacuum of the former clouds the latter. And yet, this may be one of the most accurate films I've seen at capturing latency-age children's attempts at engaging with their trauma precisely because of how hazy and unromantic it is; the artist broadly compassionate toward the youth's anger without any actual engagement between artist and youth, for the child is allowed to be confused and we can't artificially teach him everything to self-actualize to his and our standards in two hours. If I was still working with institutionalized youth - who mostly all expectedly love Miyazaki's work, in my experience - I'd pick this as a therapeutic device to spark processing for the pre-teens and teenagers, more than any of his other work, and more than most films I've seen recently (and this is a far cry from any top ten for me, despite liking it just fine!)

[Mr Sausage]

I can’t quite parse the difference.

Are you serious? It's not a fantasy if you're actually being heroic.

Have you even seen the movie?

Is bashing his head in a sign of revolt, a way to momentarily escape/avoid triggers, a self-flagellating intervention to communicate the dissonance between the "Man" this boy feels the mature feelings of and desperately wants to become and the fearful shades of youth, the desire to be taken care of, the core belief that he is morally-branded as unloveable by the heavens, who took away his mother.

It's much simpler than that: the boy copes by resorting to violence. He attacks the rural boy after an alienating day at school; he slams a rock into his own face when he finds the fight hasn't helped release his emotions; he builds an instrument of death when he encounters something, an uncanny heron, that he doesn't understand. It's Miyazaki's war critique, an easy resorting to violence, including violence against the self, when confronted with external stressors. Given all this stuff takes place during the portion of the movie with all the WWII signifiers, it's not hard to read the critique. Unfortunately it's not coherent because Miyazaki also wants his boy to be upright and heroic, the kind that charges off to save people at a moment's notice, and also wants the positive female characters, the ones who'll lead the boy away from militarism, to be adept at war.

I agree that he falls into a mission of "paternal destiny" to save the aunt, but that can still be, and is escapism.. He's bored, lonely, confused, afraid, unfamiliar, and feeling fundamentally disconnected from not just his immediate surroundings but the world itself - so of course this version of fantasy will be bizarre and alienating. I don't think the film follows the exact template you outline: "embracing fantasy to avoid the miseries of reality," but does produce a spin on it. The boy ventures into a realm of fantasy to help issue control and forge a role in response to the miseries of reality. It's actually better that his fantasy isn't a safe haven. Like Spirited Away's also-bizarre and alienating fantasy to its central character, but perhaps a more dream-literate one, aids her in feeling more confident and comfortable in her skin as she emerges through stages of youth and onto a new chapter of life, The Boy and the Heron uses its fantasy world as one to trudge through in order to prove one's dignity and worth as expressed through fabled valor. The difference is this is a boy's story, and so it's a lot thinner, less imaginative, and less emotionally-transparent and unionized with the audience.

The fantasy world is not his own imagining. It's important to remember that. It's his maternal grandfather's imagining, and its reality is shared by multiple other people in his family (mother, aunt, granny maybe). The fantasy world is not his escapism, it's the grandfather's, and the boy is offered a choice to embrace escapism by becoming the new imaginer, or not. Much of my disagreement with your post in general stems from exactly this problem, that you have an imprecise memory of the movie.

Nothing in this movie claims to justify a tragedy, but it does show how we can take our tragedies (*with the objective support and caring gestures of others, a key ingredient) and find silver linings in them.

Does the mom not cheerfully say that it's ok she's going to die early, because it means she gets to have such a great kid? That's not silver lining, and it's not duty either. She quite literally dismisses the whole awful thing in one cheerful sentence. Such a weird moment and, yeah, in the context of WWII, kind of inappropriate. No, dying in a conflagration caused by a stupid imperialist war is not justified because your kid's a good egg. Obviously. Miyazaki would agree. So what the fuck is that moment about?

Still, everything builds to that final shot.

It's a stretch to say this mess of a film builds to anything. But if it does, it certainly does not build to that final shot. In fact that shot is inappropriate for a movie where we spend less than a week in that location. It's more appropriate for a story where a kid spends a whole summer in a location having magical adventures, so that the audience also sees something of the passage of time. In fact Ghibli did exactly that story, When Marnie Was There. I would've bought such a moment in that one. But then that movie is a far superior version of this kind of story, because unlike Miyazaki its aims were simple and clear and allowed to develop properly.