By Chen Yeliang — source link in the Chinese post
Recently, writing on Zhihu has felt burdensome to me due to mental health. But in the theater, Miyazaki gave me two hours free of worries. Reading answers afterward, I felt I should contribute my aesthetics and knowledge to the world, even if it isn’t pleasant.
For Miyazaki, “The Boy and the Heron” is an “unpleasant” film — you can feel it. It still has a boy, a girl, a fantastical world, and a grand adventure, like Spirited Away or Laputa — but those were largely light and joyful. Their heroes had no inner knot; eyes were firm toward the future. This one is different: the boy’s eyes are still firm, the goal clear, but he always carries a knot.
His enemy is no longer a concrete thing — not the stepmother, not the heron, not ghosts, not the castellan, not the parrot. The troubles can’t be solved by slashing or shooting anyone. He can neither leave nor fight; seeing his mother or meeting the castellan changes nothing. The world’s collapse is inevitable; he is merely a witness.
Why make an “unpleasant” film? Because the blade is pointed at himself. Dissecting oneself is never easy.
The story is actually straightforward if you grasp a few key metaphors. I pick six to form the spine:
- The Tower
There are two worlds: wartime Japan (reality) and the world inside the tower (fantasy). The bridge is the tower. Two explanations are offered: the stepmother says a clever great‑uncle built it; the maids say it fell from the sky and the uncle merely walled it in, and many died during construction.
To read the metaphor, recall modern Japanese history. After centuries of isolation under the Tokugawa shogunate, the “Black Ships” forced Japan to open in 1854. Reformers aligned with southern domains led the Meiji Restoration and modernization.
The tower “fell from the sky” and is black — the Black Ships; more broadly, Western modernity. The “clever great‑uncle” stands for the reformers; Meiji Restoration wrapped Western ideas in Japanese dress, yielding a hybrid tower.
But the tower as the bridge between worlds goes deeper: it symbolizes the entire post‑Meiji institutional system — politics, history, culture — a maze beneath. Inside, politics becomes visible; every creature stands for something. I view the tower as Japan’s whole system.
- The Tomb Owner
Many reviews ignore this key metaphor — the root of the tower’s decay, the source of pollution, the beginning. When the boy first arrives, he sees a tomb: walls outside, a golden door, a crude stone chamber within, inscribed “Those who emulate me shall die.” Even powerful Himi treats it warily; pelicans worship it, but only from afar.
The “tomb owner” is the archetype who brought the “law” of expansion and greed — a critique of the imported social order that rewards capital accumulation. It is the origin of the rot that pervades the tower.
- Pelicans
They are pitiful: greedy, timid, and they learned “man‑eating” from the tomb owner. Unable to catch fish at sea, they prey on the wah‑la‑wah‑la (the little warawara souls).
Pelicans symbolize the new domestic forces after Meiji — the class of the boy’s father: private capital. They learned expansion and compounding from old imperial powers but “can’t catch most fish at sea” — they lack the capacity.
Fish never speak; they likely don’t symbolize anything concrete — think “traditional natural economy.” The pre‑imperialist cycle was: fish at sea → we eat the meat → oil goes to warawara → warawara, well‑fed, ascend to become the future. People are the warawara; only they can sustain the world.
Pelicans were jammed into the system; like Japanese capitalism, they skipped the long gestation of Western capital. They can’t run like the natural economy, and they can’t touch the tomb owner’s cake; so they turn inward and squeeze the warawara. They know eating warawara ends the future, but the rule — “expand or die” — forces blind expansion. New pelicans can no longer fly, and thus they become…
- Parrots
The clearest metaphor: militarism. Miyazaki all but draws the mustache on their faces.
How did militarism arise? Pelicans can’t fish; the tomb owner can’t be challenged. So Japan turned to direct violence and outward expansion: 1874 Taiwan expedition; 1875 Korea (Ganghwa); 1894 Sino‑Japanese War; 1900 the Eight‑Nation Alliance; 1904 Russo‑Japanese War; 1914 WWI (Qingdao, Jiaozhou, Jinan; the “Twenty‑One Demands”); 1918 Siberia; 1927 Manchuria; 1939 the Pacific War. Each victory fed the parrots until appetite and arrogance doomed the world.
The boy’s father building Zero fighter shells is the collusion of pelican (capital) and parrot (militarism).
- The Castellan
He is Miyazaki himself. The thirteen blocks are his thirteen films. He searches for “clean stones” to stack — childhood innocence, dreams, and fantasy untainted by social rules. But he is pessimistic: clean stones grow scarce. Pollution — the law of greed and capital as success — is endless. Even the purest child must bow to it when grown. Miyazaki’s own works are not fully untainted either; they must obey commerce to fund the next film.
He wants to build a stable tower that won’t collapse — but that is doomed. To the Parrot King, it’s absurd to think your tower changes the world. The Parrot King casually piles a tower, finds it wrong, and chops it down; the world ends. Two atomic bombs fall; WWII ends; a new Japan is born. As all creatures flee the tower, parrots emerge too, instantly turning into harmless little birds that cuddle up to people — and then defecate on their faces as they fly off.
(Further sections follow the same logic in the Chinese article.)
- Mahito (the Boy) · The Wound
Back to the start: the most “unpleasant” part is the montage where Mahito fights at school and smashes his own head with a stone. There’s no production sound, no monologue, the scuffle is elided under light music — a strange treatment for an important beat.
It feels like a storyteller glossing over his wrongdoing. Is Miyazaki hiding something? No — or he wouldn’t include it at all. The bald patch remains for the entire film; his asymmetric hair is a constant reminder: Mahito did something wrong.
He injured himself, then lied to win parental concern and let his father trouble the classmate. To us it’s childish; to Miyazaki it is base.
At the end, when the Castellan offers the blocks, Mahito refuses: “I am not pure. This wound proves my baseness. If I take the stone, I will pollute it.”
Meaning: his father profited from war; he grew up in that home. He too harbors base thoughts. He is not the pure, upright hero of classic Miyazaki, but a “real person”. Building blocks is creating art; blocks are bits of life and a worldview. But if the self is base, the gaze pollutes, and the work distorts.
This is Miyazaki’s worry about Japan. Mahito is the next generation. Japanese today live with original sin, nourished — however indirectly — by violence and war. When disasters are forgotten, can they remain pure? Can they build stable towers?
As a citizen of a country once invaded by Japan, I do not presume to untie their knots. My grandparents’ generation suffered; even today, our city’s air‑raid sirens sound in September to mark the day it fell — a reminder not to forget national humiliation.
But victims of violence are not immune from violence. Polluted rules still “eat people” in many societies. Our works also worship money, status, power, and violence; kneel to consumerism.
Miyazaki’s ideals — I genuinely admire. His questions — I cannot answer.