Some thoughts on The Boy and the Heron
Feb. 10th, 2024 04:48 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
landingtreeOnce again, thoughts on a movie I saw twice, thoroughly spoilery, so recommended only for those who've seen the movie or don't want to. (Also, this skews in the direction of 'Here are some things I didn't like about a movie I liked,' since if I pause to list out positives on this snoozy afternoon, I'll never get around to posting it).
If Miyazaki goes on to make another, yet more conclusive final statement about art and empire and death, besides anything else it will be very funny.
I went in the first time not knowing if there was a fantasy element, or, if there was, how much. This seems an ideal way to watch it, since the whole first section of the movie seems to flirt with Mahito maybe not being spirited away. But watching it again did give a different kind of power to that whole section where I knew he would go. When Natsuko points at a building offscreen and there's a beat before we see the building, I thought it was going to be the tower (it is instead the factory his father's working at).
I love the film until Mahito leaves the land of the dead. Two things prevent me from being as engaged as I'd like after that: one is the lack of connective tissue between environments, the other is the way the tower seems to lack its own life and way of functioning.
We know that no matter how they try, the pelicans can't leave the land of the dead; yet Mahito and the heron leave it, and we don't know by what means. It's easy to imagine how this might have been done, in a magic non-Euclidian tower that straddles the worlds, but it still repeatedly interferes with my sense that what's happening is real. You'd think that might not feel like a problem: it's already clear that events connected to the tower exist halfway between reality and dream. Mahito's sword is back in the cupboard after he tries to fight the heron with it, yet shivers to pieces. Later, he walks to the heart of the tower in his dream, which he sees almost exactly as it will turn out to be. Despite this, I kept feeling it to be too simple, too convenient. I think I'd feel the movement through the tower more if we saw more of the transitions, the blending of the environments one with the next, instead of getting them like a series of signposts or mystical directions.
Maybe the tower just works that way. But we see little of the tower before it's overrun by parakeets, and it's only parakeets and named characters who escape its collapse. Unless the parakeets have already eaten every other denizen, this doesn't look like the ruin of a dozen worlds, a place obeying its own elaborate logic.
The aspect of location-strangeness I really like is how the tower appears disconcertingly in different places: when Mahito falls and what's below him is no longer a few storeys, but an immense gulf.
I like that we begin with another mother dying off-screen, except this time she comes back and is central to events. Even so, I wish there'd been more of her!
jsthrill sent me this interview about the behind-the-scenes animation, which is super detailed and interesting and makes me remember just how many hands go into a thing like this. Toshiyuki Inoue’s The Boy and the Heron
If Miyazaki goes on to make another, yet more conclusive final statement about art and empire and death, besides anything else it will be very funny.
I went in the first time not knowing if there was a fantasy element, or, if there was, how much. This seems an ideal way to watch it, since the whole first section of the movie seems to flirt with Mahito maybe not being spirited away. But watching it again did give a different kind of power to that whole section where I knew he would go. When Natsuko points at a building offscreen and there's a beat before we see the building, I thought it was going to be the tower (it is instead the factory his father's working at).
I love the film until Mahito leaves the land of the dead. Two things prevent me from being as engaged as I'd like after that: one is the lack of connective tissue between environments, the other is the way the tower seems to lack its own life and way of functioning.
We know that no matter how they try, the pelicans can't leave the land of the dead; yet Mahito and the heron leave it, and we don't know by what means. It's easy to imagine how this might have been done, in a magic non-Euclidian tower that straddles the worlds, but it still repeatedly interferes with my sense that what's happening is real. You'd think that might not feel like a problem: it's already clear that events connected to the tower exist halfway between reality and dream. Mahito's sword is back in the cupboard after he tries to fight the heron with it, yet shivers to pieces. Later, he walks to the heart of the tower in his dream, which he sees almost exactly as it will turn out to be. Despite this, I kept feeling it to be too simple, too convenient. I think I'd feel the movement through the tower more if we saw more of the transitions, the blending of the environments one with the next, instead of getting them like a series of signposts or mystical directions.
Maybe the tower just works that way. But we see little of the tower before it's overrun by parakeets, and it's only parakeets and named characters who escape its collapse. Unless the parakeets have already eaten every other denizen, this doesn't look like the ruin of a dozen worlds, a place obeying its own elaborate logic.
The aspect of location-strangeness I really like is how the tower appears disconcertingly in different places: when Mahito falls and what's below him is no longer a few storeys, but an immense gulf.
I like that we begin with another mother dying off-screen, except this time she comes back and is central to events. Even so, I wish there'd been more of her!
jsthrill sent me this interview about the behind-the-scenes animation, which is super detailed and interesting and makes me remember just how many hands go into a thing like this. Toshiyuki Inoue’s The Boy and the Heron
