The images speak and proclaim. They whisper and they shout. They would call out to us even in the absence of sound. These things are true of all films, yet they are true most of all in the great films. Among some of these greats are the animated worldscapes of Hayao Miyazaki.
The images had to speak for me this time, as I was only able to take in this initial viewing of The Boy and the Heron if I committed to hearing it dubbed in a language that is not my native tongue. On the side of the world that I call home, it was either this option or a no-go. I have chosen to live in a part of the world that in some ways limits my capacities as a film-lover, yet in the case of this particular film-watching experience I am grateful for those limits.
I watched this film with only a limited understanding of the words being spoken, yet the lack of words made me more attentive to the images, the music, and the ambient sounds that passed across my eyes and ears. (I understand a good deal of the language my watch was dubbed into, but in film-watching my understanding of it is only strong enough to capture the full meaning of briefer sentences.) It is true that the lack of words made the narrative seem even more dense and impenetrable than it would have been otherwise! Still, the experiment yielded some unique rewards.
The images seemed to arrive at to my senses in a different way than if they had been overlaid with words. I don’t mean to suggest that the impact of the images was deeper in this format, but rather rewarding in its own way. Take the scene with the frogs swarming onto and threatening to swallow up Mahito. This is such a strange scene in any case. Seeing it without any understandable words coming to my ears, though, lent the scene an animal intensity and confusion that added to what was going on in it.
In a similar vein, we come to the scene in which Mahito tries to visit the bedside of another character within an alternate reality and is hindered by things flying and inanimate. I think this scene arrived at my eyes in a even more devastatingly tactile way than it would have if I had really understood what was being said between characters. I felt the sting on the flesh, and there were no words there to soften or distract from that sting.
Most powerful of all was my experience of the climactic events that occur when a central character makes a key decision. Without spoiling this passage of the film, my eyes and ears gathered in a tumult that was unfiltered by words. The images, the music, and the sounds all synergized with each other to create a timeless, wordless poem. This poem spoke to me in a way about my own life, about what and who I most hold dear. What must survive, these wordless scenes asked me, and what must yield? What things in my life must live, and what things must die? I did not understand the words, but I understood the poem.
