Hayao Miyazaki opens the San Sebastian Festival with his animated gem “The Boy and the Heron”

“The Boy and the Heron”, the latest Japanese animated gem Hayao Miyazakicreator of legendary films such as “Spirited Away”, Oscar winner in 2002, opened this Friday the 71st edition of the Film Festival of the Spanish city of San Sebastián (SSIFF), which also awarded him a Donostia Award for his extraordinary contribution to world of cinematography.

Received with the first ovation of the festival, “The Boy and the Heron” met expectations: The film is a beautiful and slow-paced twilight tale by the master Miyazaki, where the usual symbols that the Japanese usually use in his mythical stories take on a superlative meaning. , from climate change to the evil of men.

The boy in the film, his alter ego, is Mahito, a boy who, after losing his mother in a fire in Tokyo, moves to the countryside with his father Shoichi to settle on a leafy rural estate where his great-uncle, the ancestor oldest member of his family – who is said to have become mentally unstable from reading too many books – built a magical tower and ended up vanishing into thin air.

Miyazaki (Tokyo, 1941) made public his intention to retire from cinema in September 2013 through a statement read by Koji Hoshino, president of Ghibli Studios – of which Miyazaki was co-founder – after presenting the controversial “The Wind Rises” ( “The Wind Rises”) during the 70th Venice Film Festival.

“There is nothing more pathetic than telling the world that you are retiring because of your age, and then announcing another comeback. Is it really possible to accept how pathetic that is, and do it anyway? (…) Is it bad for an older person to have illusions that he is still capable, despite his geriatric forgetfulness? Of course”.

This reflection, question and answer, is from the master of anime when he began, three years after announcing his retirement from cinema, to design “The Boy and the Heron”, an ‘almost’ autobiographical story that takes place in a Japan of the past that still It is alive in the filmmaker’s memories.

Its original title, which in Japanese means ‘How do you live?’, is taken from a novel of the same name by Genzaburo Yoshino that his mother gave to Hayao in his youth. What’s more, ‘The Boy and the Heron’ includes true moments from Miyazaki’s childhood, intimate details that he, for the first time, has decided to introduce into his film.

Eight servants protect the boy from the “bad” magic that stalks him: his father has remarried and his new wife is the little sister of Mahito’s mother. For the first time, the magical world in which the characters move is aquatic. Water and fire, and rocks with life mix in a story where the man-heron is a parody of the worst of men: among other things, he is a compulsive liar.

“What state will the world and viewers’ minds be in when they receive this new movie?”Mizayaki asked himself when he was planning it. “Isn’t the world in a state of flux? “We could be headed for war or catastrophe, or perhaps both,” he predicted with a sense that gives chills.

In the calendar handwritten by the filmmaker, to which EFE had access, Miyazaki calculates for 2016: “The script begins in July”; in 2017: “Storyboarding (six months). Meeting”; in 2018: “Key drawing period” and 2019: “Expected completion. By then I will be 78 years old. Will I still be alive?”

Along with the outline, notes, doubts and ‘other issues to resolve’: the money (“producer Suzuki will resolve something,” he writes), the animators (“we will promote our junior animators, but no name jumps out to me), the story (“Will it turn out well? Will we have to reduce it?”). And he finishes: “Obviously, the biggest problem is the director’s advanced age: Hmm….”.

It is his twentieth feature film, although he has also made several series for Japanese television and a dozen shorts. He began working as an animator in the 1970s, and in 1984 he created Studios Ghibli with Isao Takahata, at that time Disney’s only serious competitor.

“The Boy and the Heron”, probably Miyazaki’s last work, is a profound tribute to life, death and creation, this time, with authentic reverence for friendship.

With information from EFE