Japan during the later years of World War II: Young Mahito struggles to come to grips with the death of his mother, and that his father marries his aunt who's the splitting imageof his mother doesn't help much, neither does their move to a strange village. Once there though he's soon lured into a weird mystical parallel world by a heron, a world inhabited by giant evil parakeets, pirates, demigods and of course more herons, where a war is going on that shouldn't concern Mahito but that he has to endure in order to get back to his own world ...

Now admittedly, this isn't a film that always makes perfect sense - but that's a quality of the best films of Hayao Miyazaki by and large, that they suck one into a world that radically follows its own logic, without wasting any time to explain things away, instead letting the thing thrive on its own magic, a strategy that admittedly doesn't always work out - but it works out with The Boy and the Heron rather beautifully, a triplike journey into another world where things basically make a different sort of sense but are entertaining and enjoyable all the more for it.

review © by Mike Haberfelner

 

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