Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron: in the privacy of the master of animation (review)

A valuable documentary on the making of the last Miyazaki where we learn, for example, that he was in the corner when he was awarded his last Oscar.

Unveiled by Cannes Classics on the sidelines of the Palme d’Honneur for Ghibli this year, broadcast in the United States on Max in parallel with the release on the platform of Boy and the Heron, Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is the last in a series of docus produced since 2003 by Kaku Arakawa for NHK, the Japanese BBC, in the professional intimacy of the filmmaker and more if affinities (we open here on a rather hot thalassotherapy scene). It is exceptionally released in France in cinemas on November 21 and 22.

Docs as singularly lively and lo-fi – you almost think you’re watching an Alain Cavalier – that the Ghibli factory is artisanal, without pontificating interviews or the slightest aesthetic coquetry, in short escaping the formatting and heaviness of their Western counterparts. Arakawa clings less to the stigmata of genius than to his cigarette breaks and his everyday life, humorously desecrating the statue of the one who appears there in his naked truth as an angry and facetious brat, certainly imbued with magical mysticism (we here sees him practically going crazy, blurring the line between dream and reality in a film where he “a little too open the lid of his brain”) but governed by trivial passions.

The opportunity also to offer some decryption keys to this nebulous “last” opus (in reality, we already know that the boss is at work again), such as the direct correspondences between the characters in the film and those in the life of Miyazaki, remarkably illustrated by extracts (the Great-Uncle as the avatar of Isao Takahata, model and rival who died in 2018, and the heron for Toshio Suzuki, producer and eternal aide-de-camp). Spoiler alert: you will not see the filmmaker working on his next one, but you will be reassured by the fact that he cannot escape it anyway (“if we don’t create, there is nothing”), and he’s in great shape. Let him bury us all, for pity’s sake!