Favourite Miyazaki film

this is definitely his most abstract film and probably the densest, i'm not entirely sure what to make of it. it's decent but at times it was difficult to infer meaning from some of the abstraction and i'm not sure how all the ideas quite fit together

For me, it was sort of enough that it'd been 15 years since the world received a properly fun-weird-goofy-scary (at times) Miyazaki film. I was just thrilled to be back into the state of lulled, open-hearted acceptance that his films (excepting The Wind Rises) place me.

Plotting is not his strength, never has been. I don't let it worry me.

It was beautiful, and it hit strong emotional beats much more than I was expecting. The sense of grief ran through everything, in ways I often didn't understand. I need to see it a few more times, but it's up there with his best.

and god the music

He knows how to set sequences to music

Plotting is not his strength, never has been.

Not sure I agree with the 'never'. The plotting of Kiki's Delivery Service is so lucid and masterful you hardly even notice. I just see Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron as operating differently. The Boy and the Heron in particular seems to be playing around with logical and temporal structures (old and young, life and death, dream and literality) in a way where you can sense the strain more.

You're right. I'd say this problem looked noticeable starting with Princess Mononoke.

I should note that my critics group voted TBATH the best film of 2024, and I'm still proud.

Most challenging part for me wasn't the dream world, but how sparse the human world story was. Loved that though.

I keep thinking that this must have some connection to The Tempest. The figures of the wizard and the Heron feel so much like Prospero and Ariel.

Enjoyed everything in the tower world, found the real world sections a bit slow. But it's not the first Miyazaki movie I've found slow at times, and accept that it's my issue rather than his. I've only ever truly loved one of Miyazaki's films (Spirited Away) but there's always stretches of brilliance to make them worth watching

I actually like the slow stretches of his films. Totoro is maybe his slowest in terms of much happening, but one of his best.

Great-uncle = Miyazaki himself
Obnoxious dad = Goro, the disappointing offspring
Mahito = the idealised successor to the great man, who must overcome idle fancies and forge his own path
The tower = Miyazaki's art, which must crumble to dust upon his demise
Evil parakeets = the critics
Heron = Toshio Suzuki (Studio Ghibli producer guy)

That's all I've got

I figured the rotating mobile of paper shards represented the critics

rotating mobile of paper shards = the public

Heron = Toshio Suzuki (Studio Ghibli producer guy)

That's all I've got

― you have already voted in this dolt and cannot vote again (Matt #2)

i watched the sub and at one point the heron is described as something like an "bothersome heron" using words that sound a lot like "miyazaki hayao"

I think of Princess Mononoke as fairly straight-forwardly plotted - once you know who everyone is and what they want, you just wind them up and watch them go.

I'm glad Miyazaki can still do wind and water (and goop), but the fire, that was amazing!

Weirdly, the big-twist-that-everyone-spots-immediately (that the hero's same-age companion is their mother) is shared with the Hilda season 3 finale, which we watched recently.

It seems like it sits oddly with a few of the Miyazaki 'tropes' - there is a villain, but he's just turned cute at the end without any specific softening of his character - and it has the 'we are now friends because we've done some shit together' with the Heron, but it weirdly lampshades it by the Heron saying "you could plug this hole and I would have my full power", then Mahito plugs the hole, he tries to escape, then ... nothing really, they are now friends.

Just saw this and loved it. The start was slow, yes, but the kids were entranced anyway, but glad they went into the tower when they did as the younger one's patience was beginning to run thin.

The line I've been thinking about on the drive home is "I'm not afraid of fire"

Watched this yesterday and I don't know if it's because I was very tired but I think I'm gonna have to rewatch it again soon because so little of it made sense to me.

It was a visual feast, so many amazing bits. And not just the visuals but the sound design was so immersive. I'm glad I watched the sub first, but I also dislike having to rip my eyes away from the sensual feast on screen to read the dialogue with these films.

As ever, sometimes it's the small nits of these films that seem magical. There was a little sequence towards the start where the Boy takes his shoes off and walks barefoot on the wooden floorboards of the house, and I swear I could smell the scene of the wood.

With most of Miyazaki's movies I expect a certain amount of "things that don't at first make sense". I gelt the same anoit Howl's the first time i saw it and kow it's a firm fave. Maybe it's something to do with the visual language that jars my understanding, but on first viewing I felt that not enough of it linked up properly for me to truly make me feel involved in the plot.

Like, there were significantly long sections where I was just thinking " okay what is happening and why?" Or simply feeling that it was sequence after sequence of random events that didn't seem to segue properly together. The characters were constantly going in and out of different doors, turning into different characters, and seemingly turning into each other.

I'm sure it will make more sense on subsequent viewings but it did feel like a messy cake with spaghetti hoops on top to me - so many layers and metaphors and doors within doors within doors. It was A LOT. But maybe that's a good thing?

I couldn't figure out if Natsuko was his aunt or his mum reincarnated or just an unrelated person, for example. I don't know why she shouted at him and told him she hated him. I couldn't figure out why Himi was ostensibly his mum. I didn't really get why the Heron started out malicious and then decided to be helpful. I couldn't figure out what the stone and the blocks were meant to be, or why the one old lady turned into a young lady with completely different character traits.

The whole thing bamboozled me as well as my other friend who came with me. Meanwhile our two other companions felt the plot was very simple and straightforward, so who knows. We all watch films differently.

Apologies for all the typos. New phone don'tcha know

I've got to say I think I preferred the real world parts, slow as they were. I spent that part thinking "okay I'm ready for the freaky otherworld now", but as soon as that happened it just seemed to become a layercake of random events - like a story being made up by a six year old as he goes along: "Oh let's have a water mum effigy and now the floor is melting and now the old lady is a young lady and now it's a sea world and we're going fishing and the baddie heron is now a goodie gnome, then let's have some cute marshmallow people and now PELICANS and now CANARIES and now a flame room and now the step mum is ANGRY and now the stepmum is his aunt and his mum is a girl and now there's a big stone and now there's uncle Einstein who's going to talk about Miyazaki's legacy and now they're in the real world again oh wait they're not...." etc.

I love fantasy and otherworld stuff, and I think Miyazaki achieves this in most of his films really well. But this felt extremely disjointed with everything being thrown in mostly because it looks cool.

If there is symbolism and allegory in there, cool, but i felt there was A LOT of it all crammed into one space and it was hard for me to work out what was significant and what was just there for the heck of it

Unlike something like Spirited Away, which felt non-stop action packed and viscerally overwhelming, this one has a LOT of Ma in it. Also, due to that negative space, the foley work and sound mixing is incredible! I kinda can't wait to watch it again with some really nice headphones just so I can listen to all the rustling, scraping, steps and breathing again.

― octobeard, Saturday, December 16, 2023 11:12 PM (two weeks ago) bookmarkflaglink

Interesting you feel that way about Spirited Away. I felt like that film was incredibly well paced in terms of action/reflective scenes (the Sixth Station sequence, Granny's house, quieter, less consequential parts where Chihiro is just doing housework etc...
Whereas TBATH felt incredibly stuffed, almost claustrophobic once they left the real world - it was dizzying.

To use an analogy we both might enjoy: I feel like this is Miyazaki's NTS Sessions to Spirited Away's LP5: Totemic, labyrinthine, sense-bombarding to the point of overload

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qH2q9ZJMaAU

Miyazaki's manga Shuna's Journey is beautiful. Every panel a work of art. I highly recommend everyone check if their libraries have it. It got reprinted last year in an English translation.

Finally saw this last night with my brother JoeStork. We both felt sort of shell-shocked at the end of it and then, as we talked about it, came down on the side of really liking it. Also we both absolutely loved the giant murderous parakeets with their hilariously dumb faces and their huge butcher knives.

I was impressed by how long and grim the first part of the movie - the real-world part - is. There's such a long stretch with very little dialogue and this feeling of unresolved jangling grief hanging over all of it, and the almost silent sequence with his first day at school and everything that follows it is so horrifying in its intensity while telling you almost nothing about what is actually happening in Mahito's mind. Other than, of course, that he is desperate. And it's telling that he goes straight to self-injury rather than tell his father what happened to him. This is a child who has learned to keep his thoughts to himself and not to ask for things. (And frankly I wouldn't try to talk to that dad either. What a dipshit. Why do both of these perfectly nice-seeming women feel the need to marry this dude?)

Anyway, it's so rare for anything to be paced slowly these days, let alone something aimed at children, and Miyazaki does this without even offering the rewards of, say, the slow and quiet parts of Totoro, so that there were moments where I thought, "This is beautiful in a grim way but I don't know if I can put myself through watching it again." And yet I ended up feeling like it was essential to establish the stakes of the movie, how much Mahito needs to be able to save someone.

I liked how understated the reveal is that Mahito does indeed save his mother, just as the heron promised he could - that the year where she disappeared into the tower and the time that he is spending there are happening simultaneously, and that when she leaves through a separate door at the end, she is returning to her life in the real world.

ponyo

Shoulda called it Disturbance At Heron House

ha!

It's coming on Netflix, right? I want to watch it again. It has stayed with me. I think it's pretty great.

Oh, boo hiss, that's only outside the U.S. It'll be on Max here with the rest of the Ghibli films. Well, I'm sure we'll renew our Max subscription at some point.