Hayao Miyazaki, beloved animator and director, has recently retired at age 82 (for the fourth time) after releasing The Boy and the Heron. The last time he retired, his final film was The Wind Rises back in 2013. While these two films are both masterful in their own right, together, they paint a revealing portrait of who Miyazaki is as a director and a human being. 

The Wind Rises opens up on a quote from Paul Valéry – “The wind is rising!…We must try to live!” This is emblematic of what The Wind Rises tries to achieve as a whole, creating a more contemplative, literary work than Ghibli works past – while their previous films open with grand new beginnings, fantastical dogfights, The Wind Rises starts with a French poem from which any number of meanings can be extracted. Genre-wise, The Wind Rises is a classic biopic, following engineer Jiro Hirokoshi as he creates airplanes, including the Mitsubishi A6M Zero, the plane used to bomb Pearl Harbor. Hirokoshi desperately tries to preserve his childlike love of airplanes while ignoring the bloodshed his creations cause – he even says at one point “We’re not arms merchants; we just want to build good aircraft” to try and convince himself – but his nightmares are still filled with images of bombs, bullets, and devastated lands. Engineer Giovanni Caproni thinks similarly, proclaiming “Humanity dreams of flight, but the dream is cursed.” Miyazaki is similarly cursed by his dream as an animator – saying anime is “produced by humans who can’t stand looking at other humans”. He despises the current state of anime, with more and more garbage coming out every year, the medium he mastered desecrated by countless power fantasies and oversexualized women, art isn’t being created anymore, only content to be consumed and forgotten. Yet, even so, we must try to live. Reality is cruel, but our dreams of a better future make it beautiful.

Ten years later, Miyazaki released his (as of now) final film, The Boy and the Heron. At its core, The Boy and the Heron follows Mahito, an 11 year boy exploring a fantasy world while processing his grief over his mother’s death. Yes, the film’s plot is a lot messier than that, with so many plot points and thematic threads to keep track of, but putting all that aside, the most interesting for our current purposes is the Grand Uncle. He’s a character who rules over the fantasy world, trying to create a world of perfection for nearly his entire life, but his rule is soon coming to an end. At the end of the movie, he offers Mahito the throne, but Mahito chooses to decline and live in reality instead. Studio Ghibli has also struggled with finding a successor and they too ultimately failed and were acquired by Nippon TV, a broadcast television network. The Boy and the Heron, then, is Miyazaki coming to terms with this. He has made perfect fantasy worlds for his entire life, and now, when his time has come, he can finally let Ghibli go. The magic the studio created might never be cast again, but the legacy he has left on will live on forever, the millions of people he affected with his art will live on, and Miyazaki and the Grand Uncle are both ready to let their worlds go. The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron are both perfect final films, reflecting on legacy and dreams in a way that only a master of their craft in their final years can do. Sure, they might not be the studio’s best films – after all, Studio Ghibli has created some of the best films of all time, from My Neighbor Totoro to Princess Mononoke to Spirited Away and both The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron function much better with the context of those earlier films. But what these two films do is reveal parts of an artist that he never outwardly shows. Miyazaki is a cantankerous old man in public, to the point that he walked out on his son’s first movie. The Wind Rises, then, is Miyazaki revealing some regrets – Caproni also proclaims that “Planes are dreams. Cursed dreams, waiting for the sky to swallow them up.” So, too, is animation. Sure, the end result is undeniably beautiful, but at what cost? Goro Miyazaki, his son, has proclaimed “Hayao Miyazaki, to me, is ‘Zero Marks as a Father, Full Marks as a director’” and details how his father was never around, always busy animating, Goro Miyazaki never knowing anything about his father and turned to his films “because I wanted to learn about him through them”. Hayao Miyazaki was swallowed up by the sky, cursed by his dream. The Boy and the Heron is a response to that, acting both as a final chapter to the story of Studio Ghibli, and a message to his son that he couldn’t possibly convey in real life – “I’ve come to terms with my own legacy. Go forge your own.” The best final films act as a culmination of an artist’s entire life work, and both The Wind Rises and The Boy and the Heron play the role perfectly, intertwining together to act as a rumination on legacy, an apology to those hurt along the way, and a masterful distillation of what makes Studio Ghibli the greatest to ever make animated films.