Hayao Miyazaki's film garners 250,000 audiences on first day

The animated film “The Boy and the Heron,” Hayao Miyazaki's first film in 10 years, was released on Wednesday. Even without any film promotion activities arranged in South Korea, the movie drew 255,000 audiences on its first day – with as high as 60 percent recorded in advance ticket sales, illustrating how popular his film is among South Korean fans. The film, a beautiful autobiography of the 82-year-old director who wrote the story in his own way, asks a question of all of us who share an instant timeframe of the universe.

The animated movie starts with a scene of burning flames. With a civil defense siren going off in the capital city of Tokyo, Japan, an 11-year-old boy named Mahito loses his mother to fire. His father, an owner of an arsenal, relocates to a rural community with his son and marries his sister-in-law, Natsuko. Devastated by a sense of loss after his mother died and complicated emotions arising from his aunt being his stepmother, the boy harbors malice. One day, a mysterious heron flying from somewhere says, "Follow me. You will see your mother again.” Mahito, desperately missing his dead mother, is drawn into a different world of another time-space layer.

The plot is not easy to understand because it is full of cryptic metaphors derived mostly from autobiographical elements of the director's lifetime. He borrowed the title “The Boy and the Heron” from a book of the same name that his mother gave him in childhood. Just like Mahito, he was also born in 1941 and spent his childhood in the countryside to avoid air raids during the war. The granduncle in the film is inspired by producer Toshio Suzuki, one of the director’s friends and coworkers. It took as long as seven years for him to hand-draw the film without any help of computer graphics. Indeed, audiences are wowed by all the palpable vitality giving life to roaring flames, fluttering paper, and fish intestines wobbling and pouring out.

The film does not teach us what we need to do about life. However, it drops hints in a scene where when Mahito wants to go back to his world, albeit dangerous and dark so that he can reunite with his friends, the granduncle advises him to build his own tower. This sounds like a lesson that the director has learned while dedicating his life to the tower of Studio Ghibli and hopes to share it with his fans.


Ji-Sun Choi aurinko@donga.com