A good deal of the critical reception for The Boy and the Heron, the latest from famed animation outfit Studio Ghibli, likens the film to a swan song. Hayao Miyazaki’s on-and-off-again relationship with retirement leaves the film feeling like an open-ended farewell. The perception is fitting for a film so freighted with existential anxieties about moving on and growing up. But the film is as interested in beginnings as it is in endings, and Miyazaki’s canny ability to elegantly complicate that otherwise simple dichotomy is what makes The Boy and the Heron such a striking experience.

However, it was well into the final act of the film before I was convinced that the film contained a meaningful whole. For much of the first hour, The Boy and the Heron is notably grounded. Young Mahito (Soma Santoki), following the tragic death of his mother, moves into the country with his father’s new wife Natsuko (Yoshino Kimura). It is here where Mahito struggles with grief, toils in isolation, and is accosted continually by a gray heron. Hints of something more fantastical are glimpsed somewhere under that heron’s beak, but it is quite some time before the film opens up, and spectacularly so, into its wondrous fantasy world. After momentarily besting the heron, Mahito finds himself thrown into a place outside of his space-time in search of his mother.

It is in this second hour that the film morphs rapidly into something far more sprawling. At points, its narrative beats are so disconnected that it begins to feel like a picaresque Wizard of Oz (one of the film’s most astonishing visual sequences, involving a swarm of amorphous souls ascending into another plane of existence, is isolated enough that it could be a movie of its own). While I was carried along through the first hour by the curiosity of Mahito’s discoveries and the grounded nature of the character building, the (intentional) loss of footing one experiences upon Mahito’s frenetic series of encounters in this other world made me worry that the film was too stuffed with liveliness and incident for its own good.

I was disabused of this notion during the climactic final sequences, where the forward momentum of the plot found a target and remarkably simple visual metaphors stacked (literally and figuratively) upward toward a grander statement. Effortlessly, Miyazaki threads the lush fantasy world he created and the story of a mourning boy together into an emotionally dense meditation on the precarity and preciousness of life itself. In a Sisyphian effort, we can spend our every waking moment building up, stabilizing, and maintaining a comfortable existence, and in a single moment it can all come crumbling down around us. The stakes could not be higher, but Miyazaki makes it all appear so clear and simple. The tower can fall, and life can still move on. The Boy and the Heron is a stunning achievement, both visually and emotionally. It’s one of Miyazaki’s best.

The Boy and the Heron: A-

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)