It has been a while since I watched an anime movie. Yesterday I went to the cinema and saw The Boy and the Heron, directed and written by Hayao Miyazaki. I was touched by a couple of themes which are represented in the movie.
The hero of the story is Mahito, a 12 years old boy who loses his mother in a fire in 1943, at the hospital where she worked.
Of course that I could do the ultimate spoiler alert and tell you everything that is happening in the movie and go into details. I won’t. Because my mind and my soul got stuck on one scene from the entire anime and I can’t forget how it made me feel.
There is the night. I can see the moon. I can see Earth. Everything around me is caressed by the glimmering lights of the moon. The art in the movie made me feel that I am right there, near Mahito, as he watches the little white creatures departing to get born on Earth. They choose to be born there. I thought about reincarnation, if you believe in such things. I thought about my own insignificance, how small I am in comparison with the whole Universe. I felt humbled in my own body watching the scene.
Coming back home I could not stop thinking about what I saw. About the fact that maybe we are souls who choose this journey because it is well worth it, just as Himi, the mother of Mahito, chooses to come on Earth, knowing she will die in the fire, but wanting it anyway because the experience of being Mahito’s mom will be well worth it.
I thought about pain. About how it serves a bigger purpose if we learn our lesson. It is true that I learned the most when I was down on my knees. I did not learn so much from my successes, my failures and heartbreaks were my biggest teachers.
I saw myself a bit in Mahito. The child like ambition to always seek the truth. The desire to grasp the past in the hope that it might change the future. His introspective nature is what I find beautiful. It is always soothing to know that at any moment one can shut down and go within in the search for a lost light.
We all have a Mahito inside of us. Someone who is searching for a meaning in chaos, for hope when everything seems lost. This anime is just a beautiful visual metaphor for life and for the beauty of the ancestry which will never be washed away from our blood.
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