3/1/2024 0 Comments Best year opus one![]() ![]() “The Boy and the Heron” had been a top priority for them long before the public even knew that Miyazaki was almost done making it. Which isn’t to say that Jesteadt and company had been twiddling their thumbs all that time. And that’s because they still hadn’t really started the recording process yet. ![]() On August 31, 2023, more than six years after “The Boy and the Heron” was first revealed but less than three months until GKIDS would open its dub in American theaters alongside the Japanese-language version, the team at GKIDS still wasn’t sure if they knew the answer. For the team at GKIDS, however, that metaphor became an extremely literal challenge that confronted them from the start of the dubbing process: How would they honor the immortal history of Miyazaki’s imagination while also heeding his (potentially) final movie’s call to create something new? In “ The Boy and the Heron,” it becomes a bracingly simple metaphor for the moral order of the universe - one that arrives at the end of a film that constantly references the pain and beauty of Miyazaki’s previous work before leaving Mahito the challenge of imagining a better tomorrow for himself. That Jenga-like balancing act is all too familiar to anyone who’s ever been responsible for dubbing an important film, a process that requires people to recreate the essence of an entire universe with an entirely different set of pieces. The story of an embittered young boy named Mahito who moves to the countryside with his father and his aunt - his father’s pregnant new bride! - after his mother is killed in a Tokyo hospital fire at the height of World War II, the movie’s grounded first half gives way to a dreamlike second in which Mahito wanders into an alternate reality shared between the living and the dead a place where the souls of unborn children are swallowed by hungry pelicans as they float up to the human world, and an old wizard - Mahito’s granduncle - is forced to save the dimension from collapse by rebuilding a wobbly tower of wooden blocks every three days. “ The Boy and the Heron,” as Miyazaki’s opus would come to be known outside of Japan, is both the most autobiographical and the most abstract of the filmmaker’s movies. The pressure was high, but the degree of difficulty was even higher.
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