#toasthaste

the elements i enjoyed:

* the opening.  the opening was so extraordinarily patient!  i was astounded how long it went with only the barest *hints* at the supernatural.  the heron swoops by, the heron calls Mahito’s name at the window, the heron breaks a stick in half—and that is all.  around and between those scenes are long, long stretches of Mahito wandering in the backyard, the old maids haggling for cigarettes and canned meat, Mahito alone in his room, Mahito at school, injured, convalescing.  it’s so tender and tense at once; i wondered if maybe we were *never* going to drop into an otherworld, and honestly was kind of excited about what kind of story that might be.

* but, drop into the otherworld we do, and there—ah, there was this discordance & darkness i really loved, and a lot of rather explicit rumination of *death*, that i loved even while it made me shiver.  it’s the darkest of any Miyazaki i’ve seen, i think—other films have had unbounded appetite as a malignant force (e.g. No-Face’s devouring spree in the bathhouse in Spirited Away), but it’s never been so pervasive or *unchecked* as it is here.  (the only thing that stops the parakeets is dragging them out of that world entirely.)  in a big way i thought the pelican’s death was the movie’s lynchpin.  prior to that point, the otherworld has seemed frightening and unpredictable, but the pelican’s description makes it sound truly *evil*.  or—if not evil, so ill-shaped for life that it makes evil *inevitable*—whether the pelicans devour the warawara, or the pelicans starve to death, either way it is a *malformed* kind of death, the death that comes from oceans devoid of fish.

it’s a far cry from the kind of death we see in, say, Princess Mononoke, where death is a daily reality in this war-swept world, something to be faced straight-backed and unflinching; any dread should only come from the choices made up to that point, not at death, which is only a natural conclusion of the choice once made.  compare to Spirited Away, where death (or other forms of fairy-like entrapment) is—indeed formidable, profoundly scary, but hard work and determination and keen thought lets one dodge over those bad ends.  but in The Boy and the Heron, death happens unnaturally, unavoidably, a symptom of some profound disorder because it is a profoundly disordered—diseased, even—world.  (in Mononoke, the lepers lead hard lives, but find life in honest labor as members of Lady Eboshi’s iron town; the starving pelicans have no one.)

* so at that point i’m on board, we’ve got this grieving kid surrounded by hideous death-vibes on all sides, but…

well that leads very naturally into the elements i *didn’t* enjoy haha:

* it’s natural Miyazaki wants to bring in that great-uncle character and his blocks, offering Mahito the choice we all get in some way: pick the very few things you can move, and move them ever so slightly to right the wrongness.  it’s rather *on the nose*, but i think i get why it’s there, and it could’ve worked, if the whole story were *just* about that diseased world, but…

* this whole thing started with Mahito and his step-mom, right?  grieving kid?  needs to learn how to cope with grief & grow up a bit & maybe be a bit more chill to stepmom & ascend beyond the kind of kid who hits himself to garner sympathy?  the way it’s presented in the movie, that blocks-world choice feels so *utterly disconnected* from any of those things Mahito needs to do.  he says a pithy little bit about how he has to return to people who love him, but—i mean, have we seen him actually change much in relation to those people!  (hanging out with young!Kiriko, maybe, but doesn’t feel like enough.)  and also, this world sort of sucks and he was only reluctantly dragged there in fhe first place; is there a reason we’ve seen that would make him want to stay?  any pull that makes the choice feel fraught?  (compare against, e.g., Spirited Away, where it *would* be understandable of Chihiro felt torn about returning—over the course of the film, the spirit-world becomes the place where she learns her own agency and power; crossing back over the threshold into the real world means returning to the place where she was, at the last checkpoint, still a whiny little kid.)

* so yeah my feeling was that there was a serious lack of connective tissue between the idea of “mahito learns to reckon with death and grief” and “mahito learns how to navigate & triumph in this world.”  i can imagine tweaks to make that work—for one, the bait-and-switch between rescuing-mom and rescuing-stepmom felt a little strange (it was the main moment where i really wondered if i was missing some cultural nuance—i think it’s a moment of growth if mahito learns to be less *cold* to stepmom, but i don’t think he needs to literally *treat* her the same as mom, and… i got the vibe that that’s what the story expected him to do?).  and that connective tissue *could* be built up—foreshadow the appearance of the great-uncle some more, and make the stakes/weight of that choice more clear; probably have a couple conversations between Mahito and the heron that more clearly touch on, e.g., whether Mahito expects to find his mom, what he expects to get out of this, how *he* feels about saving the stepmom instead, and also the heron’s motives (i think we do! need to find out! at some point! what exactly the heron’s getting out of it—if the heron’s e.g. angling the whole time for the destruction of the world, that could add a lot of weight/triangulation to that central choice!) and the fact that at the end the otherworld is destroyed—instead of still out there, somewhere—that itself could be used as a meditation on needful vs needless death/suffering or something, idk.  that tissue isn’t in the movie itself but i think it’s gestured at.