The Boy and the Heron

There are filmmakers, and then there is Hayao Miyazaki. The Boy and the Heron is his final film, if we choose to believe that this time, and it is a work of art in the fullest sense: personal, symbolic, emotionally demanding, and visually unlike anything else on a screen in 2023.

The premise, insofar as a Miyazaki film has a premise, follows 12-year-old Mahito Maki, whose mother dies in a hospital fire at the beginning of WWII. His father, an aircraft manufacturer, remarries Mahito's aunt, Natsuko, who is already pregnant with Mahito's half-sibling. They move to the countryside estate where Natsuko lives, and Mahito, grieving and resentful, keeps the world at arm's length. A talking grey heron tells him his mother is alive in a fantastical tower at the edge of the property. Mahito follows, and the film becomes something else entirely.

I need to say something about what this film is and isn't before discussing the ideological audit, because the film resists simple categorization.

The Boy and the Heron is not a progressive film. It is also not a straightforwardly conservative one. It is something older than both categories: a Japanese artist in his 80s making his most personal film about loss, grief, inheritance, and the responsibility of one generation to the next. The politics, to the extent they exist, are the politics of a craftsman who grew up in WWII Japan and spent his entire career honoring the traditions of his culture while mourning the ones that were destroyed.

The VVWS audit scores this film as TRADITIONAL, and that is accurate, but it requires explanation.

The traditional elements are the spine of the film. Mahito's arc is about learning to accept Natsuko as a real mother, not a replacement for the one he lost. His journey through the underworld is a grief ritual that forces him to confront the reality of death and make peace with a world that has changed without his permission. The film argues, without sentimentality, that grief is necessary and that the family you have is worth fighting for. Mahito never becomes the chosen hero who saves the world. He simply goes home and accepts what is there. That is a more honest and more traditional resolution than most children's films dare to attempt.

The granduncle, voiced by Mark Hamill in the English dub, is an architect who built the tower and maintains the underworld's order. He offers Mahito the chance to inherit the responsibility of maintaining that world, asking him to stack the blocks and keep the order going. Mahito refuses. He says the world built by someone else's rules is not a world he wants to maintain. He goes back to the real world as it is, rather than trying to maintain a fantasy of how it should be. Critics have read this as Miyazaki rejecting the idea of passing his own artistic legacy to a successor. I read it as something more traditional: the child who refuses to inherit the grandfathers' obsessions and makes his own peace with the real world instead.

The film's anti-war imagery is present but understated. The WWII setting is not a political statement. It is a personal one. Miyazaki grew up during WWII and has spoken extensively about how the war shaped his generation's relationship with loss and impermanence. The factory where Mahito's father makes aircraft for the war effort is not condemned. It simply exists, the way the war simply existed, as the context in which ordinary people tried to live ordinary lives. This is not the anti-war messaging of a Western progressive film. It is the ambivalence of someone who lived through it.

The spiritual content is Japanese Shinto animism: a world where the dead and the living exist in adjacent realms, where natural objects have spirits, and where the physical world has invisible layers that the right people can access. This is not compatible with Christian theology, and Christian parents should know that going in. It is also not compatible with progressive ideology: Miyazaki's universe is ordered, hierarchical, and rooted in the past. The underworld in The Boy and the Heron is not a realm of self-expression. It is a realm governed by ancient order that requires maintenance, and that breaks down when people stop caring for it.

Where does the woke score come from? Three small places. First, the WWII setting carries an implicit anti-war charge simply by depicting the war as the backdrop for civilian suffering. Second, the granduncle's paternalistic authority is ultimately rejected by Mahito, and the film endorses that rejection. Third, the Shinto spiritual framework presents a cosmology that competes with Christian theology. None of these elements are the film's ideological agenda. All three are culturally authentic to a Japanese filmmaker of Miyazaki's generation and tradition.

Visually, the film is extraordinary. Seven years of production by a small team of hand-drawn animators under Miyazaki's personal direction produced something that looks unlike any other animated film of this era. The underworld sequences, particularly the dolmen entrance and the heron sequences, have an hallucinatory quality that feels genuinely different from anything else in contemporary animation.

The 97% Rotten Tomatoes critic score reflects genuine critical consensus that this is a masterwork. The 81% audience score reflects the honest fact that this is a difficult film: elliptical, symbolic, demanding, and not structured like a Western story. Some audiences who expected the narrative clarity of Spirited Away were disoriented. That disorientation is intentional. Miyazaki is asking you to sit with ambiguity.

For traditional audiences: this is a film about grief, family, and the dignity of accepting a world you did not choose. It is made by one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th and 21st centuries and it shows. Watch it with older children and expect to talk about it afterward.

Formula: Weighted Score = Severity × Authenticity Multiplier × Centrality Multiplier

🔴 Woke Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Anti-War Imagery and WWII Moral Ambiguity	3	1	0.5	1.5
Paternalistic Authority Questioned and Refused	2	0.7	0.5	0.7
Non-Christian Spiritual Framework (Japanese Shinto Animism)	2	0.7	1	1.4
TOTAL WOKE				3.6

🟢 Traditional Tropes

Trope	Severity	Authenticity	Centrality	Score
Confronting Grief with Courage and Acceptance	4	1	1.8	7.2
Blended Family Acceptance as Moral Resolution	3	1	1	3
Masculine Coming-of-Age Through Hardship	3	1	1	3
Refusing Inherited Power in Favor of Real Life	3	1	0.5	1.5
TOTAL TRADITIONAL				14.7

Score Margin: +11 TRAD