Favourite Miyazaki film

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.