Saw The Boy and the Heron, a typically masterful film from Studio Ghibli. This one reminded me a lot of Howl's Moving Castle, another film that hearkens back to arcadian idylls, full of vast monuments, intricate passages, and malevolent danger. The film doesn't directly steal from anything, but echoes MC Escher, the grotesques of Felix Colgrave and Jan Švankmajer. The film is so touching and grand.
The opening of the film gives Pixar's Up a run for the fastest a film can break your heart: we open on the main character's memories of his mother dying in a fire. This haunts him and he becomes a stern, serious little boy who is always ready to do the right thing, ready to pull the next victim from a fire. The film is set against the backdrop of a burgeoning WW2, when the whole world was bracing itself, steeling itself; preparing itself to make the great self-sacrifice. This rigidity is the boy's strength and his weakness. He is ready to do battle with magical forces, but he cannot bring himself to face his classmates.
The film is packed with wonderful whimsey. There's a gang of seven old women who look like wrinkled little frogs and who gleefully cackle over potted meat. In addition to the titular heron, there are lots of birds, some sinister, some pathetic. There are many set-pieces with the gorgeous intricacy of the bathhouse from Spirited Away or the club house from From Up on Poppy Hill. This is a world I would love to live in, even as the characters shout cryptic warnings about waking the dead.
I loved this film. It opened with an almost palpable sense of doom: the little boy, newly traumatized by the death of his mother seems to be thrust in a new situation and engaged in self-destruction. Indeed, about a fourth of the way through, I thought I was going to write that this is the closest Miyazaki has come to a horror movie. But soon after that, the film deepens, and opens, and lifts, and it gets slowly better. Just a lovely film.
No comments:
Post a Comment