Photo: Spotify
Japanese composer Joe Hisaishi has written hundreds of scores, beginning with anime series in the mid-70s, a series of solo albums from 1981, and work with director 'Beat' Takeshi Kitano in the ‘90s.
But his best-known music accompanies the films of animator Hayao Miyazaki, starting with 1984’s Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, and including classics like Spirited Away, and My Neighbour Totoro. In fact the only one he didn’t work on was Miyazaki’s first.
Their most recent collaboration is The Boy and The Heron, potentially the final work by the director. It's deeply profound, but still appropriate for kids, Hisaishi-san’s music matching and magnifying the story’s depth.
The film's narrative is complex. Set during WWII and involving the loss of a parent, its protagonist eventually enters a fantastical world, the kind that’s familiar to fans of Miyasaki.
The 36-track score opens with ‘Ask Me Why’. It appears in three different versions over the course of the album, as do many of these pieces, with new harmonies and arrangements recontextualising them as the story shifts.
Hisaishi delivers broad musical motifs - this is a children’s movie, after all - which have earned him comparisons to regular Spielberg collaborator John Williams.
Part of the composer’s genius, aside from matching tone to picture, and creating distinct melodic earworms, is the way he subverts his own work.
During a section of the story featuring anthropomorphic birds, a certain melody is heard repeatedly, but Hisaishi changes its surroundings each time, so the same series of notes sound quirky, then sinister, and eventually, during a royal procession, majestic.
A figure who enters the film near its end is accompanied by Hisaishi’s boldest, most enigmatic set of chords. The Boy and the Heron is a film that becomes gradually more profound as it goes, and on repeat viewings feels like Miyasaki’s attempt at a defining statement, not just about his life, but everyones.
The music amplifies that feeling with this composition, which in its last iteration is called ‘The Great Collapse’.
The film was released in Japan under the name How Do You Live?, which is much more appropriate, if less easily marketed. Yes, the movie features a boy, and a heron, but its scope is much larger, even if younger viewers may miss some of the profundity.
There are rumours that Miyasaki has begun work on another film, but if this is his last, it marks the end of a great creative partnership. His first collaboration with Joe Hisaishi was 40 years ago, and the composer has always found ways to compliment, and complicate, the director’s work.
If you’ve seen the film, some of these tracks may prompt a sniffle or two, and knowing it could mark the end of an era strengthens that response. It wasn’t lost on me that the album’s final track is called ‘The Last Smile’.
