The optimistic absurdity of Miyazaki’s “The Boy and the Heron.”
The following discusses the themes and philosophies of Hayao Miyazaki’s recent film, “The Boy and the Heron.” As such, it will contain spoilers. It will also discuss themes of suicide — this is a trigger warning for that.
“It’s not that I can’t believe in god,” says Ivan in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s masterpiece, The Brothers Karamazov, “It’s this world he’s created that I do not, and cannot believe in.”
The Boy and the Heron — or as it’s known in Japan, How Do You Live? — is Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film. In traditional Miyazaki fashion, the film as a whimsical and dizzying journey between worlds of the living and the dead, featuring youthful protagonists who mature through a journey into the absurd.
It’s also one of Miyazaki’s most polarizing films. Initial reviews have hailed the film as a masterpiece and one of the auteur’s most sophisticated and adult films; others see it as confusing and disjointed. To be sure, the film is less direct than his previous works — and even Miyazaki himself has said he doesn’t totally understand it.
The journey follows Mahito, a young boy whose mother recently died in a hospital fire. The eve of the mainland war in Japan during World War II is on the horizon, including the firebombing of Tokyo, which killed at least 80,000 people and left a million unhoused. Mahito’s father, who owns an aerospace manufacturing factory, moves to the countryside, where the boy meets his new mother — who is, as is foreshadowed early on, his mother’s younger sister, Natsuko.
After a series of strange occurrences involving a pestering grey heron, Natsuko goes missing in a nearby tower (with a mysterious legend behind it) and it’s up to Mahito and his caretaker, Kiriko, to save her.
Watching the film, the narrative can fly by in incoherent spurts. But upon two viewings, a clear message began to develop for me: that of “Absurdism.”
The Absurd
“There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide,” wrote Algerian philosopher Albert Camus, the father of absurdism. “Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.”
Absurdism is often lumped in with existentialism — and to be sure, the two were influential philosophies developed in the 20th century. Camus even had a capricious friendship with existentialism’s champion philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre.
But in contrast with existentialism, which seeks to understand how we should live, absurdism seeks to understand why we should live at all. Divorced from the entrapments of religion, community, or family, Camus’ philosophy questions how we find meaning in an ultimately meaningless — or absurd — world.
As Camus writes in The Myth of Sisyphus:
“…in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”
Camus says the realization of absurdism in the world is a series of inevitable pieces. There’s “mechanical life,” which is the rote routine of daily chores. Inevitably, a moment shocks us out of the lull — something calling to attention the strange and fragile structures that dictate our lives. From that break, we must choose one of two paths: to continue living or pursue means to avoid it.
“Living, naturally, is never easy,” writes Camus. “You continue making the gestures commanded by existence for many reasons, the first of which is habit. Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit, the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”
Absurdism gives power to the title of a book given to Mahito by his mother, titled How Do You Live? This book is very real — written by Genzaburo Yoshino in 1937, the book dictates the etiquette and ethics that form a responsible adult. You might call it a guide to growing up.
In the context of the film, the audience must ask what Mahito is living for. While chasing a talking Grey Heron to a nearby tower of legend, it’s with a mindset of loss, grief, and pain that Mahito embarks on a journey to what I will call the “underworld.” This is a similar journey to that of Dante Alighieri, the Italian Renaissance writer, who is guided by Virgil through hell in pursuit of his lost love. The phrase above the entrance to the heron’s tower even signals that this is a similar journey: Fecemi la divina potestate, or “I was made by divine power,” which is written above the gates of hell in Dante’s Inferno.
At the beckoning and mysterious promises of the heron, Mahito is chasing the source of his grief: the loss of his mother. I would argue this pursuit also seeks an answer to a central question from Camus: “…is there a logic to the point of death?”
Once in this peculiar underworld, Mahito is alienated from reality. Pieces are familiar, yet out of place. Kiriko, who is sucked through the floor along with the grey heron, first appears as a younger custodian of this world. But Mahito doesn’t immediately recognize her. In the Ark, a massive and forested ship where Kirko lives with the mystical warawara — floating orb creatures — the old ladies of Natsuko’s boarding house above are protective figurines. The underworld is familiar yet distant, and Mahito seems comfortable in its peculiarity.
When Mahito mistakenly barges into something called the “graveyard,” and Kiriko sets the rousing spirits at ease, he does not question her imperative that he must walk back without turning over his shoulder. And further to that point, we as the audience do not get more information about what the graveyard is, or why Mahito was instructed to do so. We want to know what it means, what the story is supposed to tell us — and yet no explanation appears.
Is that determination not so different from the world above? Is Mahito not just relearning the real world, but from a new vantage? As the audience, we also exist in this strange, unexplained world, and we too search for answers, only to be disappointed. Not to put too fine a point on it too early on, but that’s also how we, the audience, try to make sense of our own capricious lives.
As Camus writes:
The primitive hostility of the world rises up to face us across millennia. For a second we cease to understand it because for centuries we have understood in it solely the images and designs that we had attributed to it beforehand, because henceforth we lack the power to make use of that artifice. The world evades us because it becomes itself again. That stage scenery masked by habit becomes again what it is. It withdraws at a distance from us.
…that denseness and that strangeness of the world is the absurd.
The Tower
Mahito’s first surreal test comes when he first meets his granduncle in the tower. After walking through a glowing tunnel, he arrives at what looks like a train station, with his granduncle seated at a table.
Here, the Tower Master shows him the magical power keeping the underworld in place: a small tower of stone blocks, the kind a child might play with. Should the blocks fall the mystical world built by the granduncle will fall apart. It’s up to Mahito, as a familial descendent, to decide if he will add to the tower and keep it standing.
This scene is somewhat later in the film, but I want to start here because I believe this sequence serves a dual framework underpinning the other motifs of the film.
Firstly, it’s a metaphor for creative inheritance — Miyazaki’s rejection that others should try to fit their pieces into his tower, their creative hopes into his already-daunting body of work. This is, to me, the most clear interpretation of the film.
That’s why this first moment is a test: the Tower Master doesn’t want Mahito trying to fix his corrupted creation, putting one more corrupted piece into a tower already filled with what the film calls “malice.” That’s also why, on their second meeting, the Tower Master wants Mahito to stack the blocks from scratch — as opposed to further propping the already existing, but fragile, world.
It’s here that the Tower Master says he had to “search the ends of time and space” to find these pieces free of malice, further cementing that the world he created was born out of his deep-seated loathing. His optimism is creased into the farthest reaches of this malicious world.
On first viewing, I was somewhat confused by the role of malice here. Other than its inherent connotation with evil, I believe the malice inherent in the world is related to the Tower Master’s reason for creating the tower in the first place: escapism.
“Modern life is so thin and shallow and fake,” Miyazaki has said. “I look forward to when developers go bankrupt, Japan gets poorer, and wild grasses take over.”
For Camus, the works of great authors inevitably reflect inner feelings like these.
“Great feelings take with them their own universe, splendid or abject. They light up with their passion an exclusive world in which they recognize their climate. There is a universe of jealousy, of ambition, of selfishness, or of generosity.”
Here, Camus is writing about our subjective experiences, not an imaginary universe filled with parakeets and wandering souls. But for Camus, that distinction isn’t important — fiction is only a further expression of a very real world.
In The Boy and the Heron, the first noted legend of the master is his obsession with the books he piles in the tower library. These books eventually subsumed his attention and the tower, and the stories he read to escape the world eventually became it. Miyazaki has said numerous times that this is his outlook: cynical, sardonic, sick of the entrapments of society and yearning for a simpler, more holistic life. His movies, then, are attempts to reconstruct a world with clearer rules, clearer expectations, and clearer solutions.
In the frame of the earlier passage from Camus, and within the world of The Boy and the Heron, the underworld is a universe of malice.
I believe the Tower Master first created the underworld in an attempt to build a perfect society free of crime, pain, and the troubles of being human. I also believe he did so out of disdain for the confusing cruelty of humanity. The malice inherent in the world comes from a misplaced hatred of being human, which is why the underworld is populated by warawara, parakeets, and pelicans. It also explains why so few people populate the underworld, and the only ones who do are trusted family members.
“The typical act of eluding… is hope,” writes Camus in Sisyphus. “Hope of another life one must ‘deserve’ or trickery of those who live not for life itself but for some great idea that will transcend it, refine it, give it meaning, and betray it.”
Mahito comes into the world with similar feelings: disdain for his classmates who bully him; distrust of the woman who married his father; and deep sadness over the circumstances (war) that killed his mother. Early in the film, when Mahito wounds himself and hits his head with a nearby stone, he’s seeking to escape the pieces of the world causing him pain. Similarly, the world outside the underworld is malicious. On a more serious level, it can also read as an allusion to suicide — coping with the pain of the outside world through self-harm, which ultimately distances us from it. The journey to the underworld is then a crossing of his River Styx and a journey to determine if life is better above or below.
But when given the chance to save his mother, Mahito faces the challenge of the underworld head-on in an attempt to change the reality above. Through that attempt, he comes to terms with the nature of death and his role in life.
The Underworld
Underneath, in the strange underworld, other creatures take the place of humans. Early on, Mahito is overrun by a flock of pelicans before breaking into the “graveyard.” As mentioned earlier, a young Kiriko comes to his rescue and begins telling him the bizarre rules of the world.
This confrontation with the warawara is the first time we’re confronted with the beginning tenants of absurdism.
As the white souls rise we’re told they’re on their way to become people above, and the aforementioned pelicans swoop through to eat them. Mahito sees them as antagonists at first — who would eat such innocent creatures? But it’s afterward, when he stumbles upon a wounded pelican nearing death, that his perspective shifts.
The pelican says their only point for existing here is to eat the warawara, because after all, no matter how far or high they fly, they return to the ark, and their bellies remain empty. The sky is their domain, and the warawara are their food — what more is there?
Here we see the absurdity of the world the Tower Master has created. It’s clear the creatures here have been thrust into this confusing place without purpose — blocks out of place — and after the Master returns to his “heaven,” those creatures below are left to rationalize their reason for being. If the pelicans are hungry and the warawara are their only food, it becomes their purpose in this world to eat them. The rote necessities of their lives give them — and their absurd world — meaning. While Mahito believes there is a moral problem at hand, the pelicans argue they are doing what they need to survive, and Mahito is moved by their justified aggression.
With this lens, I also see a further layer of war in this scene. To defend the warawara, a young girl named Lady Himi launches fireworks to scare (and maim) the pelicans. The onlookers cheer and the malicious pelicans are driven off. But the fire also burns some warawara in the crossfire.
I see this as a parallel with our human tendency to justify aggression — a battle over resources that we rationalize as necessary for life, and the subsequent deaths of innocents in their salvos and our defense. The pelicans meant no harm and were just trying to live. The same for the warawara. Is one more morally right than the other?
The use of the pelicans here is to demonstrate that all nature is dependent on need and that absent humans, nature is not a place free of pain and suffering. In removing humanity from his world, the Tower Master believes that he is sparing it from cruelty; but the eating of the warawara, and the casualties of their defense, is a further nod that nature is also a place of inherent chaos and suffering, and much more than a uniquely human problem. Even then, as humans, we justify our actions according to need, and our needs give us purpose in a purposeless world. Sometimes our actions benefit us at the expense of others. And in something like war, those actions come at a cost to ourselves, too.
That’s when we arrive at the role of the parakeets.
In this world, a society of parakeets functions as humans. They run restaurants, cultivate farms, foster families, and hold banquets. But they’re also violent and bloodthirsty, their nest in the tower strewn about with axes and bones. At their head is a white parakeet, their leader.
By anthropomorphizing the parakeets, Miyazaki paints a small window into our solipsism and our belief that the world exists according to how we see it and believe it to be. He seems to be saying that given the chance, parakeets would rule the world much like we would — and perhaps with the same bloodlust, too.
Camus would seem to agree with the Tower Master in his assumption that nature is orderly, and not chaotic and malicious.
“If I were a tree among trees, a cat among animals, this life would have a meaning, or rather this [Absurd] problem would not arise, for I should belong to this world,” says Camus, remarking that the world outside of human experience must surely be simpler and more detached from these human problems of ‘purpose.’
As for Miyazaki, he seems to say that human supremacy is largely contextual, a lucky roll of the dice and nothing divinely ordained. Or, it’s more cynical: nothing can ever be fixed, and all nature is built on malice (alongside goodness, of course).
Put another way by Camus, as if in direct conversation with the Tower Master: “If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy.” Conflict is a necessity, he seems to say.
If the parakeets are people, then, the Tower Master is their god.
There are even, with a generous reading, notable religious icons. Later, when they bring Lady Himi to the tower, they bring a tribute, or sacrifice, to bargain with god. The emblem on the parakeet’s banners also clearly resembles a cross, and their crusade to preserve the underworld is a religious sojourn to heaven — an inverse of Mahito’s odyssey.
But the King Parakeet seems to know that the Tower Master is just a creative human given the gift of magical power. So what is the point in paying tribute to a god who sees them as a plaything, a failed experiment? This world is — as can be characterized by something like the Christian god — a means to a jealous and egotistical god’s end. The world is for him, not for us. And yet for the parakeets, the world is all they know. When King Parakeet recognizes that they are not the destined inheritors of this world, he makes the decision to abandon god entirely.
“To become god is merely to be free on this earth, not to serve an immortal being,” Camus writes. “Above all, of course, it is drawing all the inferences from that painful independence. If God exists, all depends on him and we can do nothing against his will. If he does not exist, everything depends on us.”
I see a tenuous connection here to Milton’s Paradise Lost and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. In the case of Frankenstein, the eponymous doctor is disturbed by his creation. In recognizing his creation as failure, Frankenstein instead chooses to run from it rather than correct it, and the monster is left to wander the world in pursuit of his reason for being. This feeling of betrayal and abandonment is also a criticism of God by Satan in Paradise Lost, and sets him on his quest to ruin God’s newly created world.
This connection is all the more concrete after King Parakeet and his lackeys first walk to the top of the tower.
“Is this heaven?” asks a parakeet, while the other later ponders if this is “paradise.” Indeed, the top of the tower is a beautiful garden, an Eden of sorts, and one has to wonder why the King Parakeet lacks any astonishment at its discovery. I surmise it’s because King Parakeet had already seen their god for what he is: nothing more than a selfish architect, the loom through which the world’s tapestry was spun, and not an omnipotent being. If he was all-powerful, why would he hide in his heaven? It’s because he created the world out of vanity, without taking responsibility for the suffering and absurdity that followed it — a responsibility the king has elected to shoulder in lieu of that divine guidance. To me, this is a clear critique of religion.
While many of the parakeets obsequiously follow the King Parakeet, he seems to have evolved past the need for blind faces. In turn, he himself has become a kind of figurehead, or god.
“The absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and nothingness,” Camus writes. “He can then decide to accept such a universe and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the unyielding evidence of a life without consoloation.”
King Parakeet accepts the indifference of his universe as strength. God is a tool, a weapon, and the religious fervor of his followers mirrors that of our own belief in divine crusaders and oracles — a belief the powerful eventually mature enough to reject. Later, upon seeing Mahito choose the world above over rebuilding the tower, King Parskeet takes his sword and slashes the tower in half, ending the fantasy for all. But he does so on his terms.
“God is dead” as philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “and we have killed him.”
Indeed, by the end of the film, the Tower Master is presumably dead, and the parakeets have killed him, too.
The End
The reactions to The Boy and the Heron are polarizing. Detractors have said the film felt incoherent, the least revealed piece in Miyazaki’s oeuvre.
Others have pointed to the 4-act Japanese film structure of “kishotenketsu,” which subverts Western-style storytelling by using four acts to drive a story without the use of conflict. Others have pointed out a proclivity in Japanese films to employ “dream logic.” Indeed, the film ultimately feels like a dizzy dream, and as viewers, this world feels unexplained and absurd. I do believe that is intentional, rather than an artistic shortcoming.
Even in Camus’ Myth of Sisyphus, his dialectic of absurdism, he pulls on stories and fictional characters to draw conclusions on the absurdity of life. Things happen without us intending them to; things exist without us intending them to, from the smallest creatures in the largest forests to the unknowns at the deepest depths.
What are we limited to by our human eyes, our human ears, our human smells? How is the world different for a pelican, or a parakeet? The film seems to want us to live within that confusion and unsettling uncertainty in what it all means, because that’s just how life is. The conflict of the film is alienation. And yet, despite the uncertainty, we must continue to view it and continue to live it.
While the blanket interpretation of the film is that it’s an allegory for Miyazaki and his works, I believe there’s a darker underpinning — one that asks us to weather grief not because we want to, or even choose to, but because we inevitably have to. That grief, chaos, and fear is not exclusive to us as people, and pretending the rest of the world is better — and that we, too, are better — is a lesson Mahito embraces and the Tower Master shirks. And while absurdism is a philosophy that can feel hopeless, Mahito’s eventual decisions show the optimism that lies within it.
For Camus, life mirrors the myth of Sisyphus, a man condemned to roll a bolder up a hill for eternity, only to have it roll back down. In The Boy and the Heron, I have to wonder: is the Tower Master Sisyphus? Instead of being doomed to roll a boulder up a hill, is continuing to build an always-tilting tower of blocks not the same thing? Is this not as futile as it is compulsive?
To Camus, there is a small victory built into the little triumphs of maintaining our lives. Pinning ourselves down to tradition, religion, or the future is an alienating crutch that masks our search for something deeper. That doesn’t mean life is devoid of meaning — rather, Camus seems to say that we should find meaning in the things we can’t control. Reinvention is possible, but only by changing ourselves, and not our circumstances, as the Tower Master seeks to do.
The choice to continue is powerful in itself.
“At each of those moments when [Sisiyphus] leaves the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.”
Notably absent from this film is any real villain. In Princess Mononoke, it’s Lady Eboshi and her lust for expansion and iron at the cost of the forest; in Castle in the Sky it is Colonel Muska; in Spirited Away, the zealous Yobaba.
And yet in The Boy and Heron, who is it? The Heron, who becomes Mahito’s friend? The soft and aged Tower Master? King Parakeet, who seeks to defend his only kingdom? Without a clearly defined antagonist, the audience is asked to scrutinize the motivations of all characters — and in the end, each character harbors a darker villainy within themselves.
For Mahito, it’s his selfishness and grief at the cost of his family. The Tower Master is the same: his pursuit of perfection leads him to vanity and vainglorious hatred for humanity. For King Parakeet, it's pride and solipsism. And so on, and so on.
The film itself is a Sisyphean journey through absurdism. The Tower Master first builds the world out of disdain for humanity, instead hoping to make sense of it through his kind of ‘book’ or ‘story.’ When this world fails, too, the only solution is to stop running from a world of failure and attempt to rebuild it and instead take ownership of our piece within it.
When Mahito rejects adding a tower piece in the first test, I believe it’s him rejecting the Tower Master’s fantasy. In the end, when he pulls the piece from his pocket, he realizes that he will always be a piece in someone else’s tower. The solution is to take ownership of our place within it, instead of seeking a new tower to build somewhere else.
There is a point when the Tower Master checks to see if the tower will stand for one more day. It quivers, but stays. That’s when Mahito exclaims, “…this world will only exist for one more day!?”
The truth is that we only ever exist one day at a time.
“…during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it,” writes Camus.
The distant future is an illusion, and to make sense of our lives, we build expectations for us to inhabit. But our worlds are always fragile and at risk of toppling. The only real choice, then, is whether we continue living it.
For Mahito, it is better to live with the pieces we are given, rather than those we wish we had. When, in the end, he pulls a single piece of the tower from his pocket, it is an emblem of his small piece in a much larger world. He sees this as optimistic — it is a piece that only he can choose how to use. It is a reaffirmation of agency and Sisyphean choice.
“What does life mean in such [an absurd] universe?” Camus writes. “Nothing else for the moment but indifference to the future and a desire to use up everything that is given.”
The return to Tokyo, then, at the end of the film, is an acceptance of suffering and a realization of hope.
On the eve of the firebombing, the world of Japan is at risk of toppling. It can be inferred that during the climax in the underworld, as the parakeets begin their Icarusian climb to heaven, the collapse of their world happens in tandem with the destruction of Tokyo. But just as the parakeets escape to a familiar but different world — and one in which they are no longer the rulers — so too does Tokyo and Japan continue on, one day at a time.
“Madness and death are [our] irreperables,” says Camus. “Man does not choose… Weighing words carefully, it is altogether a question of luck.”
Here, I think of the choice by Lady Himi, who chooses at the end of the film to return to her world. She is a childhood version of Mahito’s mother, and as the two stand in a long hallway of portals to their respective realities, she chooses to go to where she belongs.
Mahito is perplexed — “But you’ll die!”
She smiles back — “But I’ll get to raise you!”
Now, to finish Camus’ thought:
“There will never be any substitute for twenty years of life and experience.”
Indeed. One must imagine Sisyphus, Mahito, Lady Himi, and all the others, happy.
