Toasting Another Octogenarian Master: Hiyao Miyazaki's 'The Boy and the Heron'
#250: "The Boy and the Heron," "Squid Game: The Challenge," "Strange Days," "The Company You Keep"
Edition 250:
Hey movie lovers!
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This week: Hayao Miyazaki is the latest filmmaking master still putting out major projects past 80 years old this year. I’ll explain why he’s important before diving into a couple more straightforward streaming recs. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” Lakeith Stanfield continues a bizarre yet compelling career.
The Boy and the Heron
If you didn’t grow up on Hayao Miyazaki, and the works of his Studio Ghibli, then I can see how a Japanese animated movie could be a pretty hard sell. It was for me, since I hadn’t even heard of him until a few years ago, when the “Japanese Disney” moniker and my friends’ fandoms convinced me to try out My Neighbor Totoro, then Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and in one glorious screening at the Academy Museum, The Wind Rises.
The overwhelming appeal of Miyazaki’s movies is not so much that they’re “for kids,” it’s that they make kids out of any viewer. You know that feeling of childlike wonder — and almost all of his protagonists are children — when life feels like an adventure with infinite possibility because you haven’t really discovered the world yet? Miyazaki is able to replicate that for a viewer through his use of the supernatural, separating the movie’s logic from the real world and allowing us to believe anything could happen next.
This, fortunately, also frees him up to draw the iconic animals and fantastical creatures he’s known for. Merchandizing opportunities? Maybe, but American viewers have decades of experience with Disney and Pixar to know just how emotionally manipulative (in a good way) a cute little talking creature can be.
His animation is almost entirely hand-drawn, with sharp characters backgrounded by painterly, almost dreamlike landscapes that add to the surreal quality of his worlds. The music in his movies is some of the best you’ll find anywhere, and the combination of the visuals and the audio puts a viewer into almost a trance-like state, furthering this return to a childlike mindset.
It’s also notable that his movies don’t really have an antagonist, or a three-act structure. Just throw out the book entirely. If I were to describe the plot of this movie — our hero’s mother dies in a fire and he’s taken to a new home in the countryside with his father’s new wife, where he discovers a magic tower that transports him into a sort of nether world where he’s able to connect with a younger version of his mother — it would sound insane. But it’s dream logic. One thing leads to the next like a run-on sentence, until in the end you don’t realize the emotional weight that has built up and suddenly you’re tearing up at some beautiful human revelation.
We should be grateful to be getting a new movie from the 82-year-old master (Scorcese, Ridley Scott…what a year for octogenarian filmmakers). His last movie, which came out in 2013, was supposed to be his last. Then there was this one, which he said he wasn’t going to do any promotional interviews or trailers for, a pure send-off. Of course there ended up being trailers, and at least one interview where someone close to him said he’s got an idea for yet another movie. So maybe it was all drummed up excitement to sell some tickets.
However, from an industry perspective, Miyazaki similarly exists sort of outside the system. His movies are not blockbuster successes or awards plays (he’s been nominated for best animated feature three times and won once), and in some ways it feels like his movies are being created as much for children 40 years from now as for audiences today. They feel timeless, almost eternal, like they’re being created now to be added to some essential movie canon.
I found this movie to be very effective, very affecting, and it’s going inside my top 10 for the year. It’s actually incredible that in the year when Marvel’s multiversal storytelling has rightfully, FINALLY, been called into question, two of my 10 are animated movies with multiverse components.
While I would still prefer for the multiverse to stop being used altogether, it’s a perfect example of why anything can work if it’s deployed correctly. If you can’t get out to see this movie in theaters, I’d highly recommend you go on Max and at least check out one of Miyazaki’s movies. It’s an undeniable part of movie history.
Something New
Squid Game: The Challenge (Netflix): There’s no release date yet for season two of “Squid Game,” the breakout phenomenon of 2021, and The Big Red Machine knows it cannot let one of its most valuable pieces of IP lie dormant for too long. So it introduced a real life reality show version of the competition…minus the whole brutal execution of eliminated contestants thing. And I’ll admit, I was so ready to hate this show as a cheap cash-grab. But amazingly, the $4.56 million prize pool proves to be significant enough stakes to motivate the players, especially as the effects of rationed food and sleeping in a dormitory makes them go stir crazy.
While the games themselves are pretty faithful recreations of the show, it’s the competitions between games that become masterful at stirring up drama among the contestants and leading to tons of that engaging gameplay strategy that makes reality competition shows so fun. The thing I respected most about the show is that it didn’t play favorites toward its best characters, making you feel like anything could happen at any time, just like the original “Squid Game.” While this show didn’t quite hit the enormous highs of Physical 100, it still had the juice to make me binge five straight episodes. Nine of the 10 are out now on Netflix.
Something Old
Strange Days (1995, Max): Newsletter reader Caroline recommended this mid-90s movie directed by Kathryn Bigelow (double Oscar winner for The Hurt Locker) with a screenwriting credit from none other than James Cameron (Titanic, Avatar) plus young Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett in the leads. That’s a lot of tasty ingredients from which to bake this dystopian thriller about a near-future Los Angeles where the drug of choice is other people’s memories, accessed through a headset (think “Black Mirror”).
It’s an interesting hook, and we know no one does world-building better than Cameron. This neo-cyberpunk, crime-infested L.A. has his fingerprints all over it, but as with some of his other projects, the characters and story to fill out the world leave a little to be desired. Here, the movie is overstuffed with about five different “main” themes and three different plots that all becomes quite convoluted, until they’re settled in the end by a very 90s-style, tied-up-in-a-bow conclusion. The movie is a clear response to the Rodney King L.A. riots, and offers a visual feast from Bigelow with strong character work by Fiennes, but fair warning that it’s a bit exhausting to sort through.
Something to Stream
The Company You Keep ($VOD): Good luck finding any other movie with as many recognizable actors as this 2013 thriller directed by Robert Redford. There’s more than a dozen (look for yourself!), with Shia Lebouf in the lead and Redford, Susan Sarandon, Stanley Tucci, Nick Nolte, Anna Kendrick among the supporting cast.
This style of movie is cat nip for me, and not just because Lebouf’s protagonist is a journalist from a local paper. It’s essentially a detective movie putting together the clues about a domestic terrorist group (that really existed in the late 60s, born out of the anti-Vietnam movement) that had evaded police capture for 40 years. It’s a clever conceit to allow a class of actors in their 60s and 70s real substantial parts, and because they’re all big names, there’s no tipping of the hand to solve the mystery. I enjoy movies that are able to keep viewers mostly in the dark about what’s happening until the end, while still providing a satisfying experience throughout. Several elements don’t hold up under the scrutiny of “would that really happen like that,” but when you’ve got an all-time movie star like Redford — and my thoughts on Lebouf’s generational talent are well-documented — who cares. Really really enjoyed this movie and would recommend it even though as of now you’d need to drop a few bucks to rent.
Trailer Watch: The Book of Clarence
LaKeith Stanfield is putting together one of the most interesting careers in modern Hollywood. Namely, he seems to do basically just whatever he wants, with little ambition toward being a giant star or winning awards. This time around he’s playing a first century slave who copies the spectacle of Jesus in order to gain money and status. Yet this trailer would lead one to think the movie will be more of a straight ahead action thriller than anything incisive, and if it’s anything like director Jeymes Samuel’s last movie The Harder They Fall, I’m expecting a modern Black sensibility imposed on an ancient setting. That’s supported by the mostly black cast except for James McAvoy and Benedict Cumberbatch as evil Roman Empire officials. I’m not really sure what to make of the movie but I am certainly intrigued.