The Boy and the Heron: How Do You Live?

Enduring, fantastical beings and locales brought to life alongside a tinge of charming relatability and emotional maturity have always been a staple of many Hayao Miyazaki films, with Studio Ghibli’s The Boy and the Heron being the legendary Japanese auteur’s latest foray into his signature style of magical realism.

Set during World War II, the film follows a young Mahito, who, after his mother’s tragic death, moves to the countryside with his dad and stepmother and soon discovers a stranded tower that leads into other-worldly realms.

With the film telling an original story inspired by the grounded 1937 novel ‘How Do You Live?’, one must presume that the 82-year-old Miyazaki, amidst his accumulated fame, experiences and lessons, felt obligated in exiting his retirement to wrestle with the philosophical notion of living.

With this in mind for The Boy and the Heron, Miyazaki deftly unleashes an allegorical playground of 2D-animated imagination that isn’t just a feast for the eyes, but an answer for the soul.

There is no shame in letting go, or even forgetting, parts of our past to start anew.

Mahito’s soul is destitute of direction, wandering the quiet plains of sadness in his mind. But the deeper Mahito traverses the stages of the heaven-inspired fantasy realm, the more Miyazaki comes upon his own answer to the question he’s been pondering.

The answer is that life can be an antithesis of itself. This means that, just as a lie can also be a truth, life can also be a tomb.

It’s a tomb of the self, where the world revolves around how you see it. It is undeniably true that you are the centre of your surroundings at all times, and as you look out into world from your own eyes, you can’t help but feel that your life must have been singularly purposeful in creation. And yet that’s also a lie, because as individually unique as we are from each other, we also revolve around one another too. We live a shared reality of unique perspectives.

Therefore, the building blocks of life that we each build for ourselves also affect others around us. These building blocks are delicate, and sometimes no matter how much we build them up, there will come a time when they fall apart. And when they do fall, your world and others’ worlds could start crumbling around you.

Does this collapse mark the end? Miyazaki tells us this is where you start. Start over. Start at the end. Start and build. And when what you build falls apart, move on and start again. There is no shame in letting go, or even forgetting, parts of our past to start anew. For the memories may fade, but the lessons linger on.

Your single tower of building blocks feeds into the billions of towers from everyone in the world. Towers that each raise their own dreams, tragedies, hopes, desires, evils, suffering, failures, love and more. Some towers are intertwined, some stand in silo. For better or for worse, this cornucopia of towers is where you live. But you alone will always know how to place your starting block.

So with that said, how do you live?