The Boy and the Heron

[psocoptera]

My basement is very slowly working its way up to flooding, but as of earlier this evening it hadn't quite gotten there, so I got to sneak out to a movie! The Boy and the Heron is deeply weird, dreamlike and disconnected to the point of being surreal. But in an interesting way, more like a "how cool that Miyazaki has the prestige that he can get away with making weird art" than "why did they do this". If I had to say what I thought it was about, I guess I would say that it might be about the use of art to grapple with trauma, about the power of the surreal, random, fantastic, and symbolic to let people approach what they can't head-on. I think the way the movie is framed, with the very long beginning part about the drawing, is asking the audience to think about it as art, and about why artists might have made this art, as opposed to thinking about it as a narrative.

(But, okay, I'm having trouble finding anything online that talks about that first part? Did that not screen with every showing of the movie? I'm talking about the long, slow live-action part with the artist whose name I can't remember doing a drawing of Kiriko. I had been reading it as part of the movie but was it some kind of bonus short??)

Comments

[psocoptera]

I posted this and one of my water alarms went off almost instantly. Like it was just waiting for the right cue. Bah.

[vardibidian]

I don't remember anything like that! I saw it in the theater in December (it was the Xmas movie) and I'm pretty sure there wasn't any live-action part at all.

Thanks,
-V.

[psocoptera]

Fascinating. Apparently we got "new bonus content" including an introduction from the film's composer (which for whatever reason I hadn't read as "part of the film proper" - I had actually been assuming it was going to be one of those anti-piracy messages) and then the "recorded drawing session with supervising animator and character designer Takeshi Honda". (https://gatewayfilmcenter.org/movies/the-boy-and-the-heron-2023/)