“The Boy and the Heron” producer and Studio Ghibli co-founder Toshio Suzuki on Hayao Miyazaki’s most personal work

As co-founder of Studio Ghibli, Toshio Suzuki has collaborated with director Hayao Miyazaki on many films. Of The boy and the heronHe was able to help bring Miyazaki’s semi-autobiographical fantasy story to life.

In his most personal work to date, that of Miyazaki The boy and the heron tells the story of a boy named Mahito who recently lost his mother. Together with a cunning and deceitful gray heron, he travels to a mysterious world beyond time where the dead and the living coexist. Suzuki says the core of the story had to change when Miyazaki’s mentor and friend Isao Takahata died. This led to the focus being on the strange friendship between Mahito and the heron.

DEADLINE: Where does the story come from?

TOSHIO Suzuki: [Miyazaki]’ had never made a film starring himself, so he felt he had to do it while he was still alive. His previous works had a female protagonist, but this time he wanted to tell his own story, so the main character should be a boy. As a producer, I wasn’t sure about this, because when I saw a lot of not only comics, but also live action films, I thought that female leads would attract more viewers. For this reason, I wasn’t quite sure about having a boy as the main character, but Miyazaki insisted that this time, since it was based on himself, he would tell a story about a real boy. He wanted to portray not only an ideal character who is very perfect and positive, but someone who has very complex emotions in him, sometimes malice or malice, and how this boy would overcome these things at a young age.

DEADLINE: Can you tell us something about the character of Heron?

Suzuki: It was by chance. He has a small garden at his house and every morning he went to the garden to smoke cigarettes. This is how he starts his day. One day this heron accidentally landed in his garden and drank the water from a small pond. The heron appeared randomly, as if it would appear one day but not the next, and then it would appear again. After all, he came every day. This is when Miyazaki decided that he would make a heron as a sidekick for the main character, the main character.

There was another incident that convinced him to make the Heron his mate. Every Sunday he helped the neighborhood to clean a neighborhood river. While he was there by the river, a heron flew by and he noticed that it was the same heron that came in the morning and drank water from the pond in his garden. That is why he felt very close to this heron.

DEADLINE: What were some memorable moments working on this film?

Suzuki: The most memorable moment during the making of this film was when the core plot of the story changed halfway through the story. This film for Miyazaki was autobiographical. At the beginning he told his own story, which was about the boy and the grandfather, with the figure of the grandfather as the focus. This character is based on [Studio Ghibli co-founder Isao Takahata]. Unfortunately, Takahata died during the filming of the film, which was very shocking to Miyazaki. He couldn’t work on the storyboard for a long time, so we decided to shift the focus of the story from the boy and the great uncle to the relationship between the boy and the heron.

Furthermore, Takahata was his main animator, he was his colleague, he was his colleague, he was his friend. Most importantly, he was the person who actually discovered and brought out his talent, so he had so much to thank him for. So at the beginning, the story was supposed to show how Miyazaki, the main character, would mature. It was about growing and maturing under the guidance of his superior. This was the theme of the film. But due to Takahata’s death, he immediately abandoned it and the story became a film about the blossoming friendship between the boy and the heron.