It took six years to complete this movie, and Hayao Miyazaki is now 82. It is possible this really is his final film. But I wouldn\u2019t entirely count on it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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How Do You Live<\/em> came out today (the 14th of July 2023, for anybody reading from the future; hi!). It\u2019s been in development for six years, but until this morning, when the first set of movie-goers was able to see it, we have known these things about it:<\/p>\n\n\n\n 1. Its title. How Do You Live?<\/em> is the name of a book which particularly influenced Miyazaki as a boy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 2. That it is not<\/em> based off the book the title came from.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 3. That it has strong fantasy elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 4. The poster, seen below.<\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n These were the only concrete pieces of information we had. It was also reported that he had said to his producer and long-time friend Suzuki that he was making it as a way to say to his grandson, \u201cGrandpa is moving on to the next world, but he is leaving behind this film.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But now it is out and I have seen it. With the caveat that I am a huge fan of the vast majority of Miyazaki\u2019s movies, so my opinion is definitely biased; this is a good film, and I am happy with it. If this is where his movie-making career ends, it has ended in a good \u2014 if strange \u2014 place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n\n\n\n For anybody who doesn\u2019t want spoilers for this movie, from hereon in I will be discussing the plot in depth (though not every detail of it! It was a long movie!). Advance at your own risk.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n\n\n\n How Do You Live?<\/em> is a movie about grief. It\u2019s a movie about a grief that is all-encompassing, and that has not been given the space to ever fully be processed, and about learning to accept it, and love it, and move past it. It\u2019s also about a lot of other things, because Miyazaki\u2019s movies always are \u2014 there\u2019s a message there for anybody who wants it. But it is also very much a movie about grief.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Our main character, Mahito, a young boy living in WWII Tokyo, loses his mother in the opening scenes of the film. The hospital she is in catches fire, and although Mahito runs to the hospital to try and save her, it is engulfed in flames long before he can get there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Flash-forward, and Mahito, now around ten years old, is being evacuated from Tokyo with his father. They are returning to his mother\u2019s ancestral home for two reasons \u2014 one, his father owns the local factory, making cockpit glass for fighter planes, and two, his father has married his deceased mother\u2019s younger sister, and she is pregnant with his child.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mahito is a well-behaved child, but he shows very little emotion, and it quickly becomes clear that he is carrying a great deal of unexpressed grief for his mother\u2019s passing. At the same time, the house they have moved to, although beautiful and quite opulent, feels deeply uncanny. It is populated almost entirely by strange old women and there is an entire building that is impossible to enter, but the most unsettling thing by far is the blue heron that seems to be following Mahito, which speaks with a human\u2019s voice and smiles with human teeth, and when it eventually manages to force its way into his room, tells Mahito that his mother is not dead but has been captured and is waiting for him to come to her rescue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This is the most disconcerting a Miyazaki movie has ever been, and at this point I was genuinely worried that this film might be a tragedy. It didn\u2019t seem likely for any number of reasons, but Mahito\u2019s misery was so viscerally expressed and yet so intensely contained, and the heron and his associates so unsettling but also so obviously offering something that Mahito both needed and wanted that it began to seem like there was no way for this character, as desperately lonely as he was, to get his happy ending.<\/p>\n\n\n\n During the heron\u2019s stalking, Mahito goes to his new school for the first time, arriving \u2014 unwillingly \u2014 by motor car in front of his provincial classmates. He very obviously doesn\u2019t fit in, and the children are hostile to him, culminating in a fight during his walk home. He is uninjured, but once the fight is over and he is alone, he takes a rock and hits himself in the side of the head, hard enough that blood pours down his face. This results in a wound that is deep enough to need stitches, and Mahito\u2019s father, furious and believing that another child did this to his son (although Mahito claims he fell) declares that Mahito no longer needs to attend school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mahito\u2019s new stepmother protects Mahito from the heron\u2019s next onslaught, but is taken ill as a result. While crafting his own weapon to potentially use against the heron, Mahito sees her walking alone into the woods, towards the forbidden building, but he does nothing to stop her. However, when the word comes later that she is missing, he realizes that something is amiss, and joins the search.<\/p>\n\n\n\n He and one of the old ladies of the house go through the rapidly darkening wood and find a tunnel that mysteriously lights up before them. It leads to the forbidden building, a tall, domed building full of books, but once they\u2019ve entered a door slams behind them and it is revealed that the heron has now trapped them there. He taunts Mahito with an illusion of his dead mother, but is forced on the defensive when Mahito manages to shoot him through the beak, disabling his magical abilities and forcing him into a half-heron, half-gnome-like form. He then reveals that Mahito\u2019s stepmother has gone through to the other world, where she is now having her baby. Mahito demands to rescue her, but when asked if he loves her that much, only replies \u201cshe makes my father happy\u201d. The disabled heron seems unwilling to comply with Mahito\u2019s demands, until a shadowy figure, the ruler of the other world, appears and says that the heron, having been defeated, should indeed take Mahito to his stepmother. The three of them \u2014 Mahito, the heron and the old woman from the house \u2014 are pulled through the floor and fall into the other world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From here, the film takes on a distinctly dream-like tone, with the world Mahito moves through making very little sense to him, but having its own clear rules and reasons. He makes friends and fights enemies, but quickly learns that even though some creatures \u2014 this world seems to be mostly populated by sentient animals \u2014 are doing things that are cruel, they are doing it to try to assure their own survival. His stepmother is here and does not wish to return, but when Mahito finally reaches her, he realizes, to his own surprise, that he does want her to come back with him, not only for his father\u2019s sake but also for his own. There is also a mysterious girl who controls fire and helps him, giving him on the way some homemade bread and jam that Mahito says tastes just like his mother used to make. The heron is an unsteady ally, but ultimately chooses to save Mahito from the army of chubby, man-sized parakeets hell-bent on eating both of them, and is visibly touched when Mahito calls him friend.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The creator of the other world, Mahito\u2019s ancestor, wants Mahito to recreate the world in better balance, believing that Mahito can do it better than he did, but Mahito, understanding himself better now, says that he cannot. Though this choice \u2014 and the actions of the general of the parakeet army \u2014 ultimately destroy the world, Mahito is able to accept his mother\u2019s death and say goodbye to her in a way he couldn\u2019t before, and make the choice to return to his own world with his stepmother, choosing that future for himself this time, rather than simply having it thrust upon him.<\/p>\n\n\n\n (The parakeets also come. Thankfully they get a lot smaller when they transfer across.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie is long, at two hours and thirty minutes, but I didn\u2019t feel a second of it. When we got to the end of the movie, the Mahito at the end was almost unrecognizable from the Mahito at the beginning, but I could trace every moment of the change he went through to get there. The movie is about grief, but it\u2019s also about joy, and letting go, and, as all of Miyazaki\u2019s movies are, about love. It\u2019s also, I think, about endings, but about the new beginnings that can sprout from them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Is this Miyazaki\u2019s final movie? I don\u2019t know for sure \u2014 I\u2019m not sure if anything can really keep that man from working for long \u2014 but I am willing to say that this movie feels like more of a letting go than anything he\u2019s made before. It is a joyful movie about endings, and if that is his last message to us, it is a fitting and wonderful one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Rating: 10\/10. Is it perfect? I\u2019m honestly not sure. I\u2019d need to watch it at least two more times, and preferably with subtitles. But has it left me feeling sad and joyous and achey in a way that most movies never do? Absolutely. So I give this a completely, utterly biased 10\/10.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014-<\/p>\n\n\n\n If you enjoyed this, please consider donating to my Ko-Fi<\/a> or supporting me on Patreon<\/a>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Hayao Miyazaki, one of Japan\u2019s greatest living directors, has been making movies since 1979, and has been retiring from making movies since 1998. He has definitively retired four times to date, after the completion of Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Ponyo and The Wind Rises, but none of them stuck. The closest he got was after […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-169","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=169"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/169\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=169"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=169"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=169"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![](\"https:\/\/todays-shasta.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/07\/img_2101-724x1024.jpg\")