The Boy and The Heron
Dec. 8th, 2023 11:13 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
got_quietI'm going to avoid spoilers in this post because I think the movie just came out in the US, but if anyone wants to talk spoilers in the comments I'm down. The only scene I mention is the first one.
I just came back from watching Studio Ghibli's latest movie, The Boy and the Heron, and it was absolutely wild. It's shot up immediately to top three Ghibli films for me though my feeling is that maybe after I've slept on it I will have a more sober reaction to it. I haven't watched much of Ghibli's new stuff. I think the last of theirs that I really sat down to watch beginning to end was The Wind Rises, which was ok but not remarkable for me. This movie though goes balls to the wall. There are a lot of familiar Ghibli elements in it: travel to other worlds, getting spirited away, a child's relationship with his parents, confronting death, etc, but the way it chooses to depict all this is through some psychedelic dream logic adventure that moves well beyond the stuff in Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle into a Paprika-like parade of open ended ideas imo.
It also straddles the line between a children's film and very much not a children's film. The first scene is almost as rough as Grave of the Fireflies and after I saw that I was like fuck what am I in for, but it calms down after that, although trauma and PTSD still appear.
The Japanese title is quite different. It's 君たちはどう生きる (Kimitachi wa dou ikiru) translated literally to "How do they live." The appearance of that title after a dramatic fire made me think it was more a "how can they keep on living" situation but it wasn't as dark as all that. (The depiction of the fire was also one of my favorite visuals of the movie) The title actually comes from a book that has very little to do with the movie at the plot level, but I can see the connection. How Do They Live was a didactic book on morality and ethics for young upper class boys published in the 1930s. The main character of this movie, a young upper class boy, has to make some major decisions about how he wants to deal with the shit world he's found himself in. The only concrete connection between the two is that Mahito is given the book by his mother, a way of encouraging him to do his best to be a good person.
The worldbuilding is a bit of a fever dream but also feels like a lot is grounded in Japanese tradition that I only caught in little tidbits as an elementary student of the subject. The "hell" that Mahito falls into, the hunger of the birds that are trapped there, etc. The nature of stone and wood is explicitly laid out which is hard Shinto.
The way that Mahito's trauma manifests was also incisive. I would have liked his relationship to have evolved with his step mother more concretely, a lot of the growth there happens internally while he's not actually interacting with her, but it was still a satisfying conclusion. She could have so easily been a villain in this and she wasn't to my great relief.
Because so much of this movie can feel like one wild occurrence after another, it's hard to even talk about. Where do I even start? I think I'll be watching this one again. I can totally see why Ghibli refused to put out any teasers or significant trailers. Watching with no idea wtf is happening is the way to go.
I just came back from watching Studio Ghibli's latest movie, The Boy and the Heron, and it was absolutely wild. It's shot up immediately to top three Ghibli films for me though my feeling is that maybe after I've slept on it I will have a more sober reaction to it. I haven't watched much of Ghibli's new stuff. I think the last of theirs that I really sat down to watch beginning to end was The Wind Rises, which was ok but not remarkable for me. This movie though goes balls to the wall. There are a lot of familiar Ghibli elements in it: travel to other worlds, getting spirited away, a child's relationship with his parents, confronting death, etc, but the way it chooses to depict all this is through some psychedelic dream logic adventure that moves well beyond the stuff in Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle into a Paprika-like parade of open ended ideas imo.
It also straddles the line between a children's film and very much not a children's film. The first scene is almost as rough as Grave of the Fireflies and after I saw that I was like fuck what am I in for, but it calms down after that, although trauma and PTSD still appear.
The Japanese title is quite different. It's 君たちはどう生きる (Kimitachi wa dou ikiru) translated literally to "How do they live." The appearance of that title after a dramatic fire made me think it was more a "how can they keep on living" situation but it wasn't as dark as all that. (The depiction of the fire was also one of my favorite visuals of the movie) The title actually comes from a book that has very little to do with the movie at the plot level, but I can see the connection. How Do They Live was a didactic book on morality and ethics for young upper class boys published in the 1930s. The main character of this movie, a young upper class boy, has to make some major decisions about how he wants to deal with the shit world he's found himself in. The only concrete connection between the two is that Mahito is given the book by his mother, a way of encouraging him to do his best to be a good person.
The worldbuilding is a bit of a fever dream but also feels like a lot is grounded in Japanese tradition that I only caught in little tidbits as an elementary student of the subject. The "hell" that Mahito falls into, the hunger of the birds that are trapped there, etc. The nature of stone and wood is explicitly laid out which is hard Shinto.
The way that Mahito's trauma manifests was also incisive. I would have liked his relationship to have evolved with his step mother more concretely, a lot of the growth there happens internally while he's not actually interacting with her, but it was still a satisfying conclusion. She could have so easily been a villain in this and she wasn't to my great relief.
Because so much of this movie can feel like one wild occurrence after another, it's hard to even talk about. Where do I even start? I think I'll be watching this one again. I can totally see why Ghibli refused to put out any teasers or significant trailers. Watching with no idea wtf is happening is the way to go.
