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Rating: I have already written a review (for a newspaper), but I can't help but share my thoughts on Miyazaki's latest film with you. For this reason, I'm writing another one.
As he approaches the end (inevitable, due to age) of his career, the master has begun (or rather, resumed) to grapple with more personal, realistic, and even somber themes. The harsh confrontation with reality in “The Wind Rises” (2013) this time combines with the classic imaginative worlds he has always accustomed us to. Young Mahito (who represents Miyazaki as a young boy) moves into his new home, with his father's new wife. His mother tragically died in a fire in Tokyo.
Hayao takes stark elements from his biography and collides them with the metaphysical world that simmers in his pencil. Not far from the country villa stands a tower, a portal that opens to all possible worlds, a sort of suspended dimension, going beyond space and time. From here, the protagonist will face moral challenges, ambiguous characters (the heron from the title, but not only), and will finally arrive at the key decision of his existence.
In the classic coming-of-age journey, Miyazaki introduces a dramatic crossroads this time. Stop here if you don't want too invasive spoilers about the film. The fact is that Mahito will have to choose between embracing a difficult legacy, that of the great-uncle who from the tower governs the balance of the worlds and of the very demiurgic art of animation (representing Miyazaki today, but also Takahata), or give up all the honors and burdens of that heavy role to instead choose a normal life, with a relaxed mother and affections (which the filmmaker was deprived of, due to Dola's tuberculosis).
The author thus arrives at a sort of dual testament, depicting himself as a wizard exhausted by the labors of creation and at the same time as a restless boy, torn by the pain of loss, following a desire as simple as it is essential: to have his dear mother back. There is the life that was and the life that could have been, there is the end and the beginning, a new beginning.
(For those who have seen the film: if we consider the protagonist's choice, we can speak of a nearly overall remorse towards existence. As if to say: "I am Miyazaki, but I would have preferred to be a happy child").
As a corollary to this, the entire figurative and imaginative arsenal of the author unfolds, but this time in darker, more unsettling tones. The inclination to lose oneself in the whirlpools of fantasy diminishes a bit, and even the creatures are now just simple animals. An ecosystem once again threatened, devouring itself due to the consequences of human venom seeping into the ocean.
But there is also an openness to novelty: even if there are no real "villains," Miyazaki gives space to the "quaquaraquà" that populate today's world, unworthy beings (ugly, without grace even aesthetically) who crowd the corridors of the tower with their greed, undermining its stability. They are the parakeets, hateful parasites beyond redemption.
Some classic elements of his work return as a citation (the living pieces of paper, the fire with dual significance, the "reversible" characters, the old ladies, the amulets, the leaps from one dimension to another). There remains only one, small flaw: that of lingering a bit too much on the introduction and thus having to deal with limited screen time for the conceptually most challenging and rich part of the feature film. But it is not chaos, because all the themes fit perfectly.
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