Queue Tips: The Boy and The Heron (2023)

I hadn't realized that Hayao Miyazaki had come out of retirement and directed another film, so "The Boy and the Heron" was a pleasant surprise.  I had no idea what this movie was about, but I ended up enjoying it overall.  I enjoyed the animation style of this movie.  

I think one of the interesting things with live action is the collaboration with the actors.  They get to improvise and try different approaches and do a little bit of the business on screen, and the director gets choices during production and post.  You can't really do that for cartoons, so I find all the subtle nuances and movements in animated films very interesting.

There was a scene where the boy walked into his room, and something about the way he lay his hat down on the bed just was very interesting for me to see.  There are a lot of moments like this in Miyazaki movies that I love to watch.

Whenever I see characters in live action movies sleeping, it takes me out of the moment for a bit.  I start to think about the fact that that is an actor pretending to be asleep.  Then I start to watch their sleeping performance closer, looking at how tight their eyes are shut, how still their bodies are, how hard or not hard they are breathing.  Stuff like that.  But in this movie, when the boy, after a long, eventful day, falls down on his bed and falls asleep, I didn't think about any of that.  I just saw how peaceful he looked, and I was kind of relieved to see him get his rest.  It was kind of like watching my kids sleep.

As far as the story goes, I didn't really find it as exciting as Miyazaki's other works, like "My Neighbor Totoro" or "Spirited Away".  It was a nice adventure, and the characters were interesting enough.  I didn't really like how characters disappeared at some parts of the film.  One character would accompany the boy for a bit, and then another one at another point, and then another would take over.  Even the heron wasn't with the boy the whole time, as the title would kind of suggest.  It wasn't really about the two of them either.  The heron just happened to be the first character to kind of start off the adventure, but it wasn't like they had a special connection or friendship, in my opinion.

I think though, if you set your expectations, you can actually really get into this movie.  It's kind of like a dream where things just sort of happen and you just find yourself going from one setting to another.  You just kind of let it take you and not really try to figure it out.  I don't know if this was based on a folk tale or Japanese myth or something, or if it was just totally made up.  

Kind of like a dream though, I feel like in the end, when the boy returns to reality, it's kind of like nothing still changed, like he just woke up from sleep.  I think so anyway.  I guess maybe internally he had changed and grown as a person.  But I don't think so really.  Of if he did, maybe I missed the point.  But I do think that this is a coming of age story about a boy who went through some traumatic events and they manifested in his dreams.