The Boy and the Heron (2023)

The bulk of the film takes place through the looking glass, in a dreamlike underworld.  It's a world where people who enter from the outside gain a timeless existence.  New livelihoods manifest around the people who go there that reflect their aspirations and values.  Whenever someone enters the domain of the Towermaster, the world transforms to reflect their idea of paradise.

In the real world, Mahito meets an elderly woman named Kiriko, one of the seven maids at Natsuko's home.  Kiriko appears in the underworld as a much younger woman.  There, a new life manifests for her.  She's sailor whose job it is to catch fish to feed the helpless inhabitants of an island in the middle of an endless sea.  She thinks she's always been there--she remembers nothing of her life in the real world.  Nevertheless, she possesses figurines of the other maids and treats them with reverence.  Because the maids are her friends, by this film's loose logic, she carries them with her, and she believes in them.  

Similarly, Mahito's mother is alive in the underworld, but as a child.  She may remember more of her former life than Kiriko, but it's not clear; in any case, she has taken a different name.  In real life, she is killed by a fire at the hospital where she worked.  In the life that manifests for her in the other world, she has power over fire, and she uses it to take care of her friends and family.

The underworld is fragmented and without rules other than the vague connections in the imaginations of its inhabitants.  Things come into view, and though they may be very beautiful, they quickly slip away without being made sense of, giving way to something completely different.  This is just how the imagination is, giving rise to impressive things that dissipate easily because they lack the connectedness of real things. 

The metaphor of this world is rather obvious: it's an imaginary world, and you have to choose between living in an imaginary world and reality.  Mahito chooses reality.  This is nothing new.  But this world being "imaginary" is nothing simple.  Those who forgot their memories all seem to have created or discovered little worlds around them that suit who they want to be.  It's a world of shared imagination, where one can enter another's dreams. 

But of course, metaphors and themes are only part of how any film plays on your expectations.  The strange thing about this film is that it's genuinely impossible to tell where it's going from the outset.  The setup is ambiguous and it proceeds in an episodic fashion from one bizarre thing to the next.

Part of it is that Mahito has no aspirations.  He acts in a way that is simultaneously selfish and aimless.  He graphically, deliberately injures himself.  He enters the underworld to save Natsuko; whenever anyone asks him why, or who Natsuko is, he says "she's someone my father likes," refusing to acknowledge any direct personal interest in his journey.  He thinks often about the moment his mother died, a moment in which we see people rendered as loose, undulating figures, and the world a made into a maelstrom of colors.   

Between this picture of mortality in the real world, the slipperiness of the imaginary world, Mahito's emptiness, and the film's passing references to World War 2, it feels throughout this film like the world is ending.  Compared to the rich, pervasive scores used in other Studio Ghibli movies, this film's soundtrack is repetitive, minimal, and applied sparingly.  It fits with the dull colors of the real world and the uncertain, broken quality of the imaginary world.  This is a sadder, lonelier, more mysterious film than most of Studio Ghibli's work.  

One of the first things we see is a gateway to the graveyard which bears the inscription: "Whoever seeks my knowledge will die."  The graveyard itself is an enormous cairn that seems to hide something, though it's not clear what.  Mortality is a hole in the world slowly sucking everything toward itself. 

And yet Mahito does manage to find something there.  He smiles for the first time an hour into the film, when he helps Kiriko care for the creatures that live around her home.  The happiest we see him is when he meets his mother, who appears in the underworld as a child his own age.  She brings him to her home near the Towermaster's mansion.  She serves him bread with butter and jam, drawn so indulgently it's almost like a parody of those Howl's Moving Castle food memes.  Mahito eats it like a toddler, smearing the jam all over his face.  We've seen this kid smash a rock into his temple, bleed a shocking amount, and put himself out of commission for a few days.  We've seen him spill tears onto the pages of the copy of Genzaburo Yoshino's How Do You Live left to him by his late mother.  For a few seconds, he gets to just be a kid.  

There is a simplicity to this that we can see in a few other parts of the film, where what you see is what you get, but the sheer draftsmanship or attention to detail grabs you.  When Mahito first enters Natsuko's house, we see it as a building of large, empty spaces and dull colors.  It looks almost like a ruin, but eventually Mahito meets the old women who tend the house.  Their arrival rouses us from the dullness, and there's a brief scene of them just walking.  Each one has a unique walk cycle, so lovingly rendered that each time I saw this movie in theaters, it got an audibly amused reaction from the audience.  It expresses nothing more or less than a fascination with life, with the fact that each of these old women is unique and yet shares her life with the others, evoking a mood something like in Cynthia Scott's The Company of Strangers.  

At the same time, the film is also highly referential.  Many frames are based on paintings.  The proper title, How Do You Live, is taken from a novel, and the novel itself is featured in the film.  Oddly, I think there are also references to Mamoru Oshii's films.  The most obvious is an image of Mahito underwater, rising to the surface like Motoko Kusanagi in the beginning sequence of Ghost in the Shell.  One less obvious may be Kiriko's home, an old boat lodged somewhere on an endless sea with an ecosystem and a group of shadow people living on it, like in Angel's Egg.  

The film is unpredictable because we have to piece together the objective from these moments of affection, memory, sensory pleasures, loss, and seeing people care for each other.  Mahito doesn't find a way to wrest the secrets of mortality from the graveyard; he finds a way to face up to world where that will never happen.  After he does, and after the Towermaster finally loses hold of his creation and it falls to pieces, we see an explosion of life.  Parakeets and pelicans burst from the doors and windows of the magic tower.  And Natsuko laughs at the beauty of it even while covered in bird poop.   

In the last few shots, Mahito loads his backpack with his mother's copy of How Do You Live and briefly looks at the broken stone building block he brought back from the underworld.  No one knows what's going to happen next, but he carries these fragments of other people's attempts to care for him.