Prologue
It was easy to conclude in the first 15 minutes of this movie that our protagonist Mahito, has been in a state of trauma that amounts to her mother’s death in a conflagration. Another consequential trauma is the fact that his father married her aunt, who looks like his birth mother, yet isn’t.
Now we have had everything needed to develop a typical storyline of how a boy deals with the trauma of losing her mother. Yet as the story unfolds, it doesn’t quite fit my first conjecture of the story. I find myself overflown with its intricacy and seemingly abrupt plot-twisting, which makes my final conclusion shaky and incoherent. Here I break down the story into four parts to discuss what the true theme that Miyazaki Hayao wants to express.
Failed masculinity
The story takes place in an old Maison that belongs to the family of Mahito’s mother, where the members of the household are female. They are old and morbid, apart from the young and beautiful hostess, aka Mahito’s stepmother, Natsuko. In the scene where the old female servants make their first appearance, they are depicted like night animals who scattered after seeing someone more powerful coming. This depiction is even more enhanced when they swarm to a suitcase full of canned food, meanwhile, in the background, an old man is left alone dying on the floor. His death is only witnessed by another old man, not by the old ladies who are more interested in fresh food. Doesn’t it remind you of the scene of vultures or mice favouring fresh food over a cadaver?
In such a gloomy place, Natsukor’s robustness and braveness are dramatically highlighted when she saves Mahito from the hazardous lure of the heron by shooting an arrow. Yet, we find soon later, that this bow was hung behind a man’s suit when she is sick lying in her room after that clash with the heron. Her room is sumptuous yet murky, which hints at the true cause of her “illness” —pregnancy.
Right after this visit, Mahito is inspired to make an arrow to cope with the heron, because the wooden sabre he used was useless. But the curious thing is, this sober was broken twice: once it was destroyed by the heron; the second time it collapsed into crumbs as Mahito tried to take it out of the closet.
Given the sabre’s evident allusion to masculinity, can we take Mahito’s twice-shattered sabre as a total defeat of masculinity, albeit premature, in reality, and in his subconscious? Wait, there is even a third defeat when Mahito’s father brandishes his real sabre to ferocious parrots flying out of the gate of the Underworld. He doesn’t manage to hurt any of them, for the parrots become benign in the real world. The masculinity failed again. It is evident throughout the story that masculinity is not the key to dealing with the main problem of this story, then what is it? The arrow? What does the arrow present?
The Heron
In the beginning, the heron is portrayed as a haunting and creepy animal who speaks with a human-like mouth that intermittently sticks out of his beak. His tentative has been to lead Mahito to a mysterious tower. Despite the mistrust and hostility towards the Heron, Mahito is guided to the tower but fails to enter because of the blocked entrance. Why does he fail? Let’s compare it with the second time when he succeeded. The only difference is that this time, Mahito was not only led by the heron, but also by Natsuko who disappears in the woods. He follows up and finds the entrance to the tower. It is the desire to get his stepmother back that enables him to enter the tower.
In the tower, Mahito manages to shoot down the heron with his handmade bow and arrow that is fletched with the heron’s feather. Thereafter the heron shows his human body under the feather skin — an ugly man with a gigantic nose. Why the real body of the heron is revealed in the tower? The first possibility is that the tower is another world, so the revelation of the heron emphasises the essence of the tower: an entrance to the Underworld. The second possibility is simply that it happened to be in this place where Mahito has the chance to try out his new weapon. Don’t forget, as the story goes on when Mahito needs the heron-man to turn back into heron so he can fly, the remedy is to fill the hole on the beak with the same material as his arrow.
It's better for the doer to undo what he has done; Mahito has to repair what he has damaged with the very thing that causes the damage. Here the heron seems a malleable creature dictated by Mahito. Can we take a guess that the heron is no other than Mahito’s subconscious or detached psyche?
I developed this doubt when the heron presents to Mahito, the simulacrum of his birth mother lying on a couch, who melts down into the water as Mahito touched her. Yet, facing such an appalling scene, Mahito doesn’t get hysterical and behave traumatised(Yes, I am referring to Shinji in EVA). Why is he so indifferent? This is a question that awaits an answer.
The heron’s action was later reproached by his master, who asked the heron to do nothing else than guide Mahito to the tower, to explore the underworld. So is the heron merely a minion of his master, who is later on revealed as Mahito’s great-great granduncle? Maybe not.
The Underworld
There are many magical and fantasy stuff in this world: ancient fish, ferocious pelicans and parrots, ghosts, fire and oval-like creatures. But what is this underworld’s essence? How do things work here? The first remarkable indication is that Mahito met a young robust woman who is no other than Kiriko, the old servant, who also got into the underworld with Mahito. In this world, she was still taking care of Mahito without any evident motivation, just like the little wooden statues of all the other old servants, who were laid around Mahito to protect him. They are still being servants. Another thing to notice is that Kiriko once asked Mahito to not touch the wooden statues of the servants. But Mahito touched them and even took away the statue of Kiriko, but nothing happened.
Later on, we learn that this world is built by Mahito’s great-great uncle, who is also the master of the heron, and this conceptual world is on the verge of destruction. Yet, as the creator of this world, he leaves the fate of this world to Mahito, who has no intention to keep it. So in the end, everything is going into what Mahito wishes for. Everything happens so easily in the story. It is even fair to second guess if his great-great uncle is also a part of himself, let alone the heron.
If everything was dictated by Mahito’s will in this world, can I conclude that this world works similarly to a fantasy, but it is not technically a fantasy? To verify this, we need to see how he gets along with his stepmother and his birth mother here.
Mother
Even though we know very early that the girl called Mimi is the sister of Mahito’s stepmother, which means this girl is Mahito’s mother; but it is almost at the end of the movie that we can be finally sure of this not-so-surprising fact.
However, if we look back on the plot with this fact in mind, it is hard to understand how the birth mother can lead her son to search for his stepmother. Shouldn’t Mahito recognise her right away and forget about the stepmother? But the story didn’t go this way. As he called Natsuko mother, the world changes, all the white stripes are blown aloft to separate them. They are breaking a taboo, of forgetting who the real mother is. But Mahito didn’t regret it. He still wants to go back with her stepmother.
Nevertheless, before coming back to the real world, Mahito asked Kimi if she wanted to go as well. Is this a genuine question, or merely a question out of courtesy and regretfulness? Just listen to what Mahito said, what an absurd excuse: what does it mean that she needs to stay here so that Mahito can be born; and she was born in the fire, so she wouldn’t be afraid of the conflagration in the far future? Is this story by now becoming that of “changing the present by going back to the past”? Of course not, we must believe this refusal is a way to make Mahito feel unguilty returning to his real world so that he can be with his new mother Natsuko.
This is, in the end, what Mahito has understood from the book his mother left for him: What kind of life do you want to live? To live is to leave behind the past and to embrace the reality.
Now we can understand why Mahito is so indifferent to a melt-away simulacrum of his mother. By that time he has begun to let her mother go. He doesn’t mind seeing her mother die again, just as he didn’t hesitate to go back to the real without her.
Conclusion:
This story is about how a boy manages to accept his stepmother by forgetting his birth mother.
01/01/2024
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