The New Hayao Miyazaki Doc Is Obsessed With Death

In Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, the legendary animation director loses close friends to old age and grapples with the twilight of his own life. Photo: Max

“Recently I think maybe I’m going to die,” says Hayao Miyazaki. He smiles, hands clasped behind his head. “I imagine thanking everyone.” The quote, striking in its off-handedness, comes near the top of Kaku Arakawa’s Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron, an NHK documentary distributed here in North America by GKIDS that follows the legendary animation director across the seven-year production of his latest feature, The Boy and the Heron. (It was quietly added to the Max service last week along with the film itself.) The statement will come to feel like a premature indulgence. As the months tick by and we get deeper into the doc, the director starts grappling with the deaths of others instead.

We watch as he plugs away on the film and loses close friends to old age. Many are fixtures of the Studio Ghibli universe: Michiyo Yasuda, a color designer and confidante; Isao Takahata, his friend, collaborator, rival, and Ghibli co-founder; Yasuo Ootsuka, a mentor; even a dear assistant. “This is what happens in the twilight of life,” he says, shuffling to his desk after learning about the latest departure. “Good grief. The bodies are piling up.”

Death hovers over every other scene. The doc doesn’t linger on the COVID pandemic, but you’re reminded of its devastation by the sudden ubiquity of face masks. When another mentor, the producer Junzo Nakajima, comes to visit Miyazaki’s atelier, the conversation quickly turns to the older man’s ailing health. An unspoken question floats over the good-byes as he gets into his car to leave: Will these men ever see each other again? It’s not often you get to see a living legend seriously grapple with the din of mortality. In many senses, it’s a privilege to witness, but watching any man outlive so many friends is a terrible thing.

Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is not an entirely accessible documentary on its own. You’d need to be versed not only with The Boy and the Heron but also Miyazaki’s broader biography in order to properly savor what you’re shown. You might find it interesting how each character in The Boy and the Heron corresponds with someone in the director’s own life, but you probably wouldn’t fully appreciate the irony of how, say, Miyazaki views his long-suffering producer Toshio Suzuki as the conniving Heron. Poor guy.

That biography is largely captured by several other NHK docs, two of which are available on Max as well: 2013’s The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness, directed by Mami Sunada, which was similarly constructed around the making of The Wind Rises, and 2016’s Never-Ending Man, also directed by Arakawa, which followed Miyazaki through the development of his first CGI creation, “Boro the Caterpillar.” (Another, the four-part 10 Years With Hayao Miyazaki, is available on Crunchyroll.) Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron retroactively turns the two mildly hagiographic Max docs into a sobering triptych, functioning as a kind of conclusion to a sustained look at a flawed creative genius who routinely defies age and pulls himself out of retirement to work on his art once more — until he comes up to the limits of whether he can do so much longer.

What’s a little different about Arakawa’s doc is how purely melancholic it feels. We see, for example, how the death of Isao Takahata, Miyazaki’s mentor and rival, weighs on him the most throughout the development of The Boy and the Heron. Though he vastly overshadowed Takahata in renown, he clearly admired and loved the man, coveting his approval that was rarely given. So Takahata continues to loom large in Miyazaki’s head long after his death, to a point where Miyazaki not-so-jokingly blames everything from the weather to losing a pencil on the vengeful spirit of his late mentor.

Arakawa likes to rapidly cut between several different scenes within a few seconds — replicating the sense of intrusive thoughts — to draw thematic and emotional associations. This device performs a few different functions: In some places, it’s used to connect aspects of Miyazaki’s own life to imagery visible in his movies; in one example, we see Miyazaki watch a small child stacking two toads atop each other that the doc smashes into the scene in Heron where a swarm of toads overwhelms Mahito, the protagonist. In others, Arakawa uses it to pin down an emotion Miyazaki tries to swerve away from. The director has a puckish quality about him, eager to cut a vulnerable statement with a wry observation or an ironic smile. “People said I’d be the first to go. Why am I still alive?” he says in one scene, before breaking into another smile. Arakawa follows this with a clip from Porco Rosso where Porco relates the story of seeing a celestial tunnel in the sky filled with planes of the many pilots who fell before him.

In this age of hyper-brand management where practically every celebrity doc requires direct sign-offs from the subject themselves, it’s striking to watch a document of a global cultural luminary being so nakedly human. Of course, Hayao Miyazaki and the Heron is still a reverent work, leaving out a few messier strands of the man’s life that Miyazaki-heads might be curious about. We don’t get anything about his son Goro, for example, whose inability to live up to his father’s shadow was a major subject in The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness. But these omissions can be read as further reflecting Arakawa’s main thematic focus, which is the inevitability of death. We watch Miyazaki age into his 80s. We see his body and face shrink a little; that puckish smile grows more weathered. His hands, which have created so much beauty, start to tremble. The doc ends on an uplifting note, capping off Miyazaki’s seven-year odyssey with The Boy and the Heron with footage of his team watching their Oscar win on television, but by then it’s hard to feel triumphant. Miyazaki may abandon retirement once again to embark on another project, but the man is now 83. Death is a fact of life, and not even geniuses can outrun this biological truth.