Hayao Miyazaki is famously attentive to particulars and symbolism. So what’s with all of the chook poop in his new movie?
Photo: The Boy and the Heron
The Boy and the Heron is many issues. It’s a capstone to Hayao Miyazaki’s profession, pulling collectively themes and visuals from all through his filmography right into a masterpiece summation of his views on youth, maturity, fascism, and grief. It’s a horror movie a couple of haunted home and a grotesque avian gatekeeper to a land of the useless. It’s a foolish movie about hungry, hungry parakeets and bizarre little guys. It’s a devastating little bit of catharsis as we witness the ache and loss required for a damaged period to fall away.
It’s additionally coated in chook shit.
As the title of the film suggests, The Boy and the Heron includes birds. Quite a lot of them, truly. There’s the titular grey heron, a supernatural man in a chook’s pores and skin who taunts Mahito, a young boy who has moved to the countryside following his mom’s loss of life in a bombing of Tokyo. There are the pelicans who gobble up Warawara, the lovable little spirits contained in the magical world the heron takes Mahito to. And there’s a military of human-like, colourful parakeets who’ve taken to the style of human flesh and developed a militaristic society. Despite the unusual skills of those fantastical birds of various ranges of anthropomorphism, they do what birds do. They poop.
The first main occasion comes when Mahito, in mattress recovering from an damage he inflicted on himself to get out of going to his new college, is visited by the grey heron. The chook grows distinctly un-bird-like enamel because it sits in his open window, taunting him with a request for his presence. It’s an eerie, unsettling scene that ends with an understated reveal: The heron has left an unlimited path of white chook shit on Mahito’s windowsill that trails all the best way down the wall and even swimming pools a bit on the ground.
There are two extra massive poop scenes, each courtesy of the parakeets’ cloacas. Upon studying that his son and his new, pregnant spouse, Natsuko, are lacking, Mahito’s dad, Shoichi, will get his sword (as a person residing in Imperial Japan does) and heads to rescue them from the mysterious tower the place the doorway to that magic world is hidden. At the identical time, inside the opposite realm, Mahito and a young woman with hearth powers named Himi must quickly duck again by means of a door into actuality to flee an armed parakeet horde. The pursuing parrots pour by means of the door and cost en masse in direction of Shoichi, who attracts his sword. But with out the magic of the tower, the creatures remodel again into common, innocent birds, and Shoichi is left unhurt, confused, and coated with poop.
Something related occurs throughout the grand, emotional climax when Mahito and Natsuko escape from the crumbling tower together with all of the now-non-magical birds. As reunited family members hug and embrace, the birds poop throughout them — a distraction none of them appear to thoughts or discover because the tears movement and Joe Hisaishi’s rating swells.
There’s poop contained in the tower, too. The painted backgrounds of the parakeets’ area appear to be splattered with a thick layer of semi-calcified goop that almost definitely is chook shit. It’s unclear whether or not it’s from the time earlier than the magic of the tower turned the parakeets into humanoid fascists or in the event that they’ve continually simply been letting it drop anyplace.
All of this chook poop is clearly intentional. It’s not just like the poop was simply the consequence of a bunch of actual birds doing what birds do. This is an animated movie, so every splatter wanted to be intentionally drawn. More than that, Miyazaki is famously attentive to particulars and prolific in his use of symbolism. So what’s to be manufactured from all this chook poop?
Does Miyazaki simply hate birds? We know he loves airplanes (they’re his problematic fav). Does he simply choose issues that fly and don’t poop? Planes drop bombs, however not less than they don’t drop a deuce? Seems unlikely. Maybe Miyazaki merely understands, accurately, that poop is very funny. The Boy and the Heron, regardless of being one in every of Miyazaki’s darkest movies, can also be fairly amusing, filled with quirky little beats and charmingly foolish animation. The birds relieving themselves is comedian reduction.
While that’s a motivating issue behind all of the poop, it’s most likely not the one one — particularly given the importance of birds on this film and Miyazaki’s reverence for the pure world.
That appreciation of nature, mirrored in movies like Princess Mononoke and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, encourages a extra profound studying of all of the poop. The Boy and the Heron is about many issues, one in every of which is how vital the top of Imperial Japan was, regardless of all of the ache that concerned. That theme isn’t refined — the legendary meteor that powers this magical world landed in Japan throughout the Meiji Restoration, which marked the beginning of the Empire. Imperial Japan industrialized and westernized itself, imposed a brutal, unnatural order to take care of its empire, and waged a warfare that devastated its individuals.
Poop, in the meantime, is extraordinarily pure. To paraphrase one other seminal Japanese textual content, everybody does it. Far from the parakeets’ uncanny facsimile of fascism, shitting in every single place is what birds are imagined to do. Nature, in Miyazaki’s movies, is to be regarded with awe, but it surely’s not good. It’s harmful and messy. Giant boars and wolves will battle with samurai, poison gasoline and monstrous bugs inhabit postapocalyptic forests, and birds poop. That’s what nature is, and it’s stunning. (And, additionally, humorous.)
