Hayao Miyazaki’s Last Film Is a Fittingly Peculiar Send-Off

For what is reported to be his last foray into film , the legendary Japanese animator, which made its international premiere here at the Toronto Film Festival on Thursday, concerns itself with themes of time and fate while diving into other worlds—the multidimensional variety and, maybe, the humble old human afterlife.begins straightforwardly, in a mortal realm we recognize: a tweenage boy, Mahito , loses his mother three years into WW II, her hospital firebombed by the Allies.

This is a familiar setup for a coming of age story, a young person managing an unthinkable loss as they struggle to adapt to new realities. But Miyazaki does not traffic in the familiar. He’s a fantasist, possessed of an odd and idiosyncratic imagination, his creations at once whimsical and frightening.in Japan, expands and expands as it goes, forsaking the grounded drama of its first act for a wild trip through the many doors of infinite-timeline possibility.

It’s all building to a specific emotional payoff, but Miyazaki takes his merry, discursive time in getting there. He’s a filmmaker obsessed with the endless detail of his designs.revels in its beauty—its windswept islands; its loving depictions of rural Japan and its wizened old ladies, whose domestic nattering belies a trove of secrets—while also provoking audiences with its ugliness.

We’re shown rushes of blood and the balloon gush of fish guts slopping out of a slit-open belly. Murderous, fascistic parakeets attempt to devour several people. The heron of the title is a grotesque trickster demon, a humanoid head peeking out of a bird’s open beak and speaking harshly, with a bitter comic edge, inBut so much of that unpleasant stuff is, gradually, embraced by Miyazaki’s humanist view of things.

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