Transcript: ‘The Boy and the Heron’, and Miyazaki’s legacy

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: The Boy and the Heron, and Miyazaki’s legacy

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend I am Lilah Raptopoulos. And this, our first show of 2024, is our Friday chat show.

This is a very special one. Today we are talking about the Japanese master of animation, Hayao Miyazaki, and his new film, The Boy and the Heron. It came out in Japan this past summer and has just in the past month made its way to the US and the UK. The Boy and The Heron is Miyazaki’s latest film with his animation company, Studio Ghibli. He is debatably the world’s most famous living animator, and he’s known for creating vibrant, fantastical worlds in films like Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro. Miyazaki is 82 years old and announced his retirement back in 2013. But here he is with a new feature-length animation that’s set during World War 2, about a boy named Mahito who enters an enchanted castle looking for his mother who’s died. Before we start, I’ll say that we do get pretty detailed about plot in this conversation. So if you’re worried about spoilers, you might want to come back. Joining me today, despite our 14-hour time difference is the Financial Times’s Asia business editor Leo Lewis. Not only does Leo know Japan first-hand, he also co-wrote a book about Japanese animation or anime. Hi, Leo. Welcome to the show.

Leo Lewis
Hello there.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi. And in London, we have Stephen Bush, a dear friend of the podcast, a resident film buff and a political columnist at the FT. His newsletter is called Inside Politics. Stephen, welcome.

Stephen Bush
Thanks so much for having me back.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks for being back. OK. So I’d love to talk about what we thought of the film. Leo, I’d love to start with you. I’m pretty sure you were the first of all of us to see The Boy and the Heron. You saw it in Japan. And one great quirk of Miyazaki is that he released absolutely no trailers or no ads for the movie. So you would have been going in blind. Can you tell us about watching it, like big picture? What were your first impressions when you came out?

Leo Lewis
Yes. So, I mean, I’ve now seen it twice. And for fans of his, for fans of anime and, you know, for fans of the canon, you know, it was lovely. And it was a really sort of you know, it was like a sort of warm bowl of chicken soup. It was exactly what you wanted at exactly the right time. But I think there was a very satisfying sense of it being something that was worth the wait. And I think that’s a that’s a big key to this, that it was worth the wait. And, you know, in the intervening period, I’d actually sat down a couple of years ago during the pandemic actually, with Toshio Suzuki, you know, the producer at the studio. And we sort of talked about, not about this project that was all under strict wraps, but just about the idea of the guy himself, of Miyazaki himself retiring. And that was a very sort of wry moment as the question of does a guy like that ever actually retire came up. And, you know, and I said as I was watching the film, I was thrown back to that conversation. It was like, yes, actually, this is not the work of a retired man.

Lilah Raptopoulos
No, it’s a man who can’t help himself.

Leo Lewis
Right. Right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What about you, Stephen?

Stephen Bush
So I loved it. I mean, I definitely have a very high tolerance level for a film, which basically it’s like, you know, it’s a dreamlike meditation on his previous work and also the succession crisis in his, you know, in his organisation and whether or not he can truly retire. And the person I went to see it with I think enjoyed it less, but I loved it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. And Stephen, when you talk about the succession crisis, you mean that it’s not quite clear what’s going to happen when Miyazaki dies and his son who has a large role in the company, is not quite the same guy.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, it’s not clear who will take over. It’s not clear if his son wants to take over. Many of the animators who’ve been there for a long time have left to form their own studio. So, yeah, it’s very much up in the air what will happen to the studio after he does retire if he truly is retiring.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, so let’s give listeners who haven’t seen it a sense of what happens in The Boy and the Heron. So plot-wise, I will start. So the main character is a young boy named Mahito and his mother dies in the first sort of nightmare scene of the film in this fire. And a year later, his father brings Mahito to the countryside because he’s decided to marry his late wife’s sister, who is now pregnant. So the boy, Mahito, misses his mom. He hates his new school. He kind of wants out of this new life. And then this giant heron appears. The heron is pretty menacing. It’s kind of a fraudster, but kind of a guide. And it lures Mahito into an abandoned castle on the property to find his dead mother, who it claims is still alive. And then a lot of juicy stuff happens in the castle. Stephen, could you explain what sort of happens or what parts you found most memorable?

Stephen Bush
So what then kind of happens is this kind of like dreamlike journey where he kind of first he’s looking for his mother, then he’s trying to find his stepmother and rescue her from this kind of weird world in which it’s, you know, kind of full of deeply terrifying birds before he kind of finally encounters his great uncle, who’s this sort of wizard at the heart of it, who then says to him that he wants him to take over fixing this world, which is otherwise going to be overrun by one of the many groups of terrifying, predatory birds. The images which really stood out for me are the light in this film is, I think, better than I have ever seen in any of the others in any animated film. In some ways, the sort of the meta theme of the great uncle figure is this kind of magical creator who every day has to get up and create more and kind of wants to stop. It feels like kind of calm. If that was the sort of final image of him as a creator, it was a very sort of powerful kind of final 15 minutes. I think, yeah, the images which most stayed with me were the bits where they were transitioning from kind of one state of this odd, sprawling, magical world to another, including my own favourite with little old ladies was when one of them kind of grows back out of Mahito’s pocket at the end. Yeah, it was really wonderful.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, totally. Leo, you liked the old ladies too, didn’t you? For listeners, they’re sort of this gaggle of caretakers of the household.

Leo Lewis
Yeah. I mean, the scene that I found very, very charming actually, and quite interesting because as the boys introduced to this house that he’s going to come to live in, he comes down a corridor and is confronted by this swarm of elderly ladies’ bottoms. And they’re all sort of in constant sort of motion, all sort of buttocks jostling with each other as they crowd over this case, which is got kind of tinned food that’s been brought from the big city.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Because it’s wartime and they can’t access, you know, tobacco and cans of . . .

Leo Lewis
Yeah. So they haven’t had this for a while. They can smell it through the case. You know, what’s so interesting to me was that, you know, as these old women show their faces and they all turn around and they’re all very distinctively different faces, but they’re all very, very familiar to watchers of Miyazaki films. They’re not, you know, in Howl’s Moving Castle, there’s a woman that looks pretty much exactly like one of the main figures in there, and he invests them with that sort of little boy’s view of what old people look like, which is both a sort of combination of kindly, but also horrific.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Kind of revolting, yeah.

Leo Lewis
And I love that. I just thought that was just so beautifully done.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, me too. I would also like to pour one out for the heron himself, who is this sort of.

Leo Lewis
The heron is put in?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Who is this? In the beginning, he’s this sort of menacing heron. And then you start to realise that his eyes are coming in through his mouth and you’re like, That’s weird. And then you start to realise that his gums are coming out of his beak, but he’s a bird and that’s sort of disgusting. And then you realise that the gums are a nose and then you realise that actually there’s like a squat little old man in the heron, dressed like a heron. And when he’s in the heron suit he’s powerful and scary and then he kind of flops out of the suit and is just this pathetic guy with no power anymore. And that felt to me also like this perfect combination of like funny and disgusting and captivating.

Stephen Bush
What I think is really clever about it is that the heron, you know, I at least, big thing was the other kind of most sort of kind of skin-crawling and scary bit at first you know with the teeth and he’s very menacing. And then suddenly it becomes comic and it becomes reassuring. And the thing I noticed in the very small screening I was in is there was a family in the front row where you could see that the children were quite scared of the heron at first, and then the heron becomes comic. And it also, in an odd way, I think the heron is also a slight metaphor for creativity in the same way that the wizard in the tower is, right, in that you know, he puts on his work frock and he’s scary and terrifying and then he’s a person wearing a suit, playing a role.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I think, I found that, like, one thing that made me kind of go with it all and trust it all is that people weren’t really all bad or all good in this film. Like, the new stepmother aunt. She wasn’t just bad, but she seemed like she might be in the beginning. And the dad was, like, kind of an idiot, but also not bad. And the heron too, and the old ladies and Mahito, even the boy was complex. You don’t always see kids being complex, which I think helped. I would love to go on to talk about the context for this Miyazaki movie and about Miyazaki himself. Supposedly, this is the most expensive movie in Japan’s history. Studio Ghibli has notoriously put out films that were the highest grossing in Japan at the time they were released. Miyazaki won an Oscar for best animated feature for Spirited Away. He’s a huge deal internationally, but I still think of him in the US as, although very well-known, kind of a cult figure. Leo, what is his role in Japan?

Leo Lewis
Yes. So, look, he . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
The most famous man.

Leo Lewis
So, yes. But he’s very sparing with his public appearances. And that has allowed a certain mythology to build around him in places. This sort of disproportionate emphasis on the things that he does say when he says them. You know, everyone’s sort of looking for hints of one type or another. And I think there’s a real sense that generationally there was a kind of golden age in which he and many other animators who became quite famous, but also, you know, manga artists from that generation now in their late seventies, early eighties, and who gave Japan that very distinctive popular culture that, you know, was the first wave to be exported or perhaps better to say, imported by the outside world. And so he is seen as one of the, one of the protectors of that sort of golden age. And, of course, you know, unlike others, he has continued to produce outstanding work long after a lot of them have kind of genuinely retired. And obviously Takahata, who was somebody that was a very key figure in the Jubilee sort of history.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yes, that’s Isao Takahata. He was actually a mentor of Miyazaki’s.

Leo Lewis
He died a few years ago. I remember writing his obituary for the FT, and in so doing you realise the fact that they were creating a genre in itself, anime, animation itself, it was not the genre they were creating, but they were creating something so distinctly Japanese that became, as it were, a way of Japan presenting itself around the world, whether knowingly or willingly or not. It was just that speaks for Japan. And so Totoro, you know, My Neighbour Totoro. You know that that is sort of entry drug for a lot of people coming into Japanese culture. You know, Kitty and Pokémon are as well. But Totoro is right there and he has a sort of has the artistic upper ground I suppose a lot of people would say because it is so beautiful, so technically wonderful.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It’s, you know, it’s funny. When the film started, I don’t know about in your theatres, but in my theatre, when the film started in the Studio Ghibli thing came up, it comes up with a picture of Totoro and when he showed up, everyone started cheering. And it’s also interesting that you bring up Pokémon and Hello Kitty, because this film feels pretty different. Like, it feels a lot darker than that. It actually feels sort of like Miyazaki’s movies fall along the spectrum from like very cute and cuddly and family-friendly and childlike, like Ponyo and Princess Mononoke, to dark and scary. Like there’s movies with scary spirits in them that are really going to keep you up at night, like in Spirited Away.

Leo Lewis
Yeah, that’s right. I mean, what links all of those, of course, is that the central character is a child, you know, I mean, that’s also true of Fireflies as well. Grave of the Fireflies as well. And I think that that does link them in a way that gives that kind of continuity through those very different types of film that you’ve, you know, you’ve just described. And actually, I think that there are moments in, you know, in Ponyo that are a little bit alarming. I think that the capacity of these films to just sort of jump out at you and be quite alarming is it’s something that, you know, for example, it is quite difficult to get that into a Disney animation. You know, you can have characters that are, you know, very distinctive, malevolent, but they don’t shock in that in quite that same way. I’m really interested to know what both of you thought. I’m for all of the, you know, the sort of the childlike sensibility, it is an old man’s film. And I must say, I left the scene about a little bit surprised that he hadn’t put in a few more moments that would allow you to think otherwise. But actually you walk out thinking this is an old man’s film.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. And then, you know, even . . . it is hard to imagine, I suppose if you’re a particularly old child, maybe you’d like a large murderer’s parakeet. But it’s, you know, it’s hard to imagine a soft toy than you would give to someone to open on their birthday without worrying that it would result in an aforementioned child screaming the house down. In terms of its interior plot logic, it doesn’t really have any. Not in the sort of bad way. But it’s a, you know, I think the thing I found, I think the Disney comparison is exactly right. And then it really made me realise how much of what you see produced by big studios now has clearly got this kind of, you know, an executive suit going, no, no, you can’t do that. That’s too scary. No, no, that’s too alienating. And this is very much a kind of no, here is my singular vision. And whatever happens with Studio Ghibli after him, it is never going to be someone which has quite such a singular vision at the heart of it ever again. Right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I did feel when I was watching it like this clearly comes from one man’s mind and it’s not something that could be replicated by anyone after him. And it’s not something that even fully makes sense to anybody but him. I was, I mean, this is a question that we’re kind of, we’ve kind of, we’re getting to and you’re, you’ve maybe answered in different ways, but I want to ask it to you both very simply like to you, what is this movie about?

Stephen Bush
I do think it is, what it’s really about, I mean, technically it is about like learning to accept your new family. But I think it’s really about growing old and the challenge of being a creative and letting go.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm hmm.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. The thing is, in the end, the world does die. And although it’s then kind of rescued.

Lilah Raptopoulos
The magical world dies.

Stephen Bush
Yeah. And although it’s then rescued with the kind of happy ending in the real world, this beautiful, terrifying, amazing world ceases to exist. And I think it is, the thing which gives its kind of wonderful feeling of grace is, in an odd way, that it’s the moment when the old great uncle wizard goes, OK, yes, I’ll let you go. And I think that’s really what it’s about. It’s about letting go.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. And so just served to reflect that back to you, and you tell me if I if I’m getting it right, the film is sort of about legacy. Who takes on the reins when you’re gone? The castle is this magical world of Studio Ghibli has created and Miyazaki has created, the great grand uncle is Miyazaki himself. And he offers the boy the reins. And when he doesn’t take it, the thing falls apart. That is about accepting that things will not be the same when he dies.

Stephen Bush
Yeah, I think that would be my take on it. I’d be interested to know. I mean, maybe Leo sitting there in Tokyo going, God, what is this seed I’m on?

Leo Lewis
No, no, I think that’s exactly right. I think that there is a, there’s an additional thing going on as well, which is that I think that we as consumers of anime and consumers of this particular studio and so on, you know, we see the finished item and it is nevertheless, it is a product, you know, it is a product into which a great deal of sweat and tears and privation, you know, does get, you know, these people, the people in the industry are heavily and oppressively overworked. And this is not to inject sort of misery into an otherwise . . . I think the point is that there is an element here, which I think is that he is also nodding to, as it were, it’s the product of anime and that these extraordinary worlds, you know, have come at a price and that all the animators, all Japanese animators know that it comes at a price. And I think in a very strange way, I think that the, as it were, that the world falling apart is, is in part saying, look, there’s just a blank page at the end. It’s both the fear. But I think it’s you know, he’s saying something about the way that these incredible worlds that he has produced time and again and here possibly for the last time he’s doing it. It’s an ephemeral thing, that the whole thing is a very ephemeral thing. For all of the way that these works, you know, will doubtless live forever. I mean, as you can imagine. so just to interject, there’s an interesting thing going on at the moment in the Japanese media, of course, which is frenzied speculation that he has another thing, another project on the go, right? And so it was very difficult to walk out of the cinema without that kind of, oh, gosh, you know, you know, in that same way that you wonder whether James Bond is going to be back each time and you wonder whether, you know, it’s that sort of, oh, so maybe he’s done this and he’s answered but, you know, you have to temper that with the reality of his being sort of reasonably elderly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Leo, Stephen, this was so much fun. Thank you so much. We will be back in just a second for More or Less.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome back to Life & Art. This is More or Less the part of the show where each guest says something they want more of or less of culturally. Stephen, I’m very curious. What do you want more of or less of culturally?

Stephen Bush
Right. So I’m going to go for a less, which is I would like a less expensive triple-A video game. So I’ve just well, I want, it’s that time of year when all of the consoles send the you know, how much of your time have you wasted this year? And I discovered that I have spent something like 450 hours playing I Was a Teenage Exocolonist, which is this beautiful, but, you know, very, very low, low, low cost indie video game. It’s brilliant and it’s available on basically everything. And I would recommend it to everyone, you know, whether you’ve got a Switch or a computer or whatever. I’ve also really loved Spider-Man 2, a game which cost an astronomical amount of money. And actually, although it’s very good, it’s not quite as good as the first one. And also you play it and you think if you had spent less on this and just reused more assets from the first game, it would be no worse and everyone involved would have a higher quality of life. So I would just like less excessive spending in the production of high-end video games and, you know, a better deal for the people who make them.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Love it. Great. Leo, what about you?

Leo Lewis
I would also have a less. So I’d like less or fewer emoji. The reason I say that is because I don’t really see that the, they keep adding to them. The latest dump was 118 and it brought the total of emoji to 3700 and something.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Really? That’s so many. I didn’t realise.

Leo Lewis
And speaking as somebody who, you know, who had to learn Japanese characters in order to learn Japanese, you know two and a bit thousand Japanese characters is more or less enough to read a Japanese newspaper or a Japanese novel. And 3700 is an awful lot of emoji. So I would like to see less emoji or at least slow down the pace of more.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, that’s a great one. Those are both great. I want I’ll do a more. I want more documentaries where less happens. I don’t just mean more observational documentaries or a certain style, I mean more like a spirit. I want where the film-maker is hanging out with someone old who has opinions and stories and life and letting them talk and stress and just sort of hearing them. There’s a great one on Miyazaki that I watched to prepare for this. 10 Years With Miyazaki. Scorsese also did one in the 70s called Italian-American. It’s with his parents and he’s just hanging out with his parents and they’re telling stories. And his mom teaches him how to make her famous tomato sauce. And it’s just great. They’re about little stuff, like the stuff of life. And the little stuff revisits me and it gives me something to think against. And I love it. So more of that. OK, Stephen, Leo, thank you both so much. This was a total delight. Please come back soon.

Leo Lewis
Thank you.

Stephen Bush
Thanks for having us.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life & Art from FT Weekend. I highly recommend you check out these show notes. We have links in there to Leo’s work, to Stephen’s newsletter, which you can try for free and to everything we mentioned today. Any links to FT.com will get you past the paywall. In the show notes, we also have discount codes for a subscription to the FT. And as always, ways to keep in touch with me and with the show on email, X and Instagram. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco with original music by Metaphor Music. This episode was mixed by Simon Panayi. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of Audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.