A spell, and also a blessing: how do you want to live your life?
Not long ago I went to see what may be the last film by the old master Hayao Miyazaki, How Do You Live? (released in English as The Boy and the Heron). I’m not a die-hard fan, but to me his works are among the most beautiful things in this world. His images are fresh and moving, yet what he expresses is restrained and understated, which gently leads us to think about it through our own experiences of life. And all these years, his original intention has never changed: he has always held the greatest goodwill toward the human world.
How Do You Live? is a little different from his earlier films. As his farewell work, it feels as if he put into it many of the deepest things he feared he might never get another chance to say, and wove in many elements from his earlier films too, so it is hard to fully grasp what he meant on a single viewing.
But why force ourselves to understand? The greatness of a work of art lies in the fact that everyone can find their own way into it, based on their own life experience and understanding. So let’s relax, and simply enjoy this subtle, complex and vivid work with our hearts.
The film tells the story of Mahito, a somewhat introverted, even withdrawn boy who lost his mother in an earlier accident. He goes with his father and stepmother to live for a while at his mother’s family home, and from there a fantastical adventure begins.
The main thread of the film moves along two dimensions.
The first dimension: time and space.
At first it seems to be Mahito’s imagination, but it soon becomes more complicated, more like a dream full of danger and detail. Then, once Mahito enters the dream, it turns into a strange and dazzling underworld, and at the bottom of that underworld lies a small world on the brink of collapse.
The main characters — Mahito, his mother, old Kiriko, and his stepmother Natsuko — each arrive from their own different moment in time, and in this wondrous space they go through astonishing adventures together. Along the way, as they come to understand one another, their feelings change.
The second dimension: emotion and the self.
The stepmother’s careful, complicated feelings toward Mahito; the father’s care for his son, sincere but only skin-deep; the old women’s pity for Mahito and wish to protect him; and Mahito’s own tangled feelings toward his stepmother, both longing and resistance.
Though the one we loved deeply is gone, the new journey doesn’t stop. We will meet more encounters and more farewells. Through them we keep feeling and keep growing, until we can face our true selves — including the cowardly and shameful parts of our past — bravely take them in, admit that we are not perfect, and then, with our feet on the ground, work hard to live a life that is our own.
In the end, Mahito becomes a brave young man his mother would be proud of, and holds tight to the happiness he can actually grasp in the real world.
Perhaps this is the old master’s blessing to us all.
I deeply admire his free spirit — “singing in the rain, not caring what others think.” I take this film as a poem full of blessings that he wrote to his own life, and to this world, the world he loves most.
And the film’s title is the blessing — a spell to remind us about life. Whenever we are sad and lost, whenever we stand at a crossroads not knowing which way to go, whenever we are searching quietly in the dark, let us ask ourselves: how do we want to live?
At 83, the old master still holds to his original heart and keeps making healing masterpieces. And us? What can we do that makes us happy? What is more worth doing?
Can we, too, live a brilliant life that is uniquely our own?
Finally, the theme song adds so much — while writing this piece I listened to it at least ten times. I sincerely hope the old master stays in good health. After all, this is a remarkable old man who released a new film ten years after announcing his fourth retirement. Let’s look forward to it together — maybe there will be another farewell film after this one.
You should still have dreams. What if one of them comes true?