The Boy and the Heron

2026

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Bi, Xiaoyan. Nonhuman as mediation: Agency of nonhuman animals in Miyazaki’s animation. Society & Animals (forthcoming).

"Hayao Miyazaki’s animated films have long been characterized by animistic ideas and ecological thought. In his works, nonhuman characters, including nonhuman animals and machines, mediate relationships among humans, society, and the natural world. During World War II, nonhuman animal characters served as key instruments of political propaganda and national identity in both American and Japanese animated films, and this tradition has persisted in contemporary Japanese animated films. However, such representations have gradually shifted from speciesism to cultural representations that serve contemporary film narratives. This article takes Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron (2023) as a case study to analyze how nonhuman animal figures generate agency through the narrative process and to propose the concept of “animal-imagery species” to explore the mediating role of nonhuman beings in Japanese animated films."

2024

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Tugendstein, Gabriel Thomas. Private vocabulary, public resonance: On Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron. Aesthetic Investigations, 7(1), 58-65.

"The latest film by Hayao Miyazaki, The Boy and the Heron, unfolds in unexpected and occasionally baffling ways. The film’s second half,especially, takes place in a world that appears to abide by a distinct narrative logic than that which viewers are familiar with. I discuss this as an instance of Miyazaki creating and working within a private, authentic vocabulary, as has been described in Existentialist and Pragmatist traditions. Specifically, I analyze its filmic language as an alloy of the memories, imagined possibilities, and losses of two of its characters, and why this depiction is so affecting."