Favourite Miyazaki film

If this is really the final Miyazaki film (and I feel like he keeps saying that and then making another one), I'm glad it has weird gloopy creatures and odd old women in it.

Wow! This looks intriguing

Pretty rapturous first wave from TIFF

xp he's already unretired again, this is no longer the final one

A friend saw it last night, and told me that a. she bawled, b. it actually felt like Miyazaki’s final filmic statement

Spoiler alert: Both the boy AND the heron are pregnant.

... how do you live?

I feel like he keeps saying that and then making another one

I'm happy to have more, but yeah, hasn't he been saying this for years? Apparently he's already pitching new ideas:

Hayao Miyazaki might not be done making movies.

On a red carpet at the Toronto International Film Festival for the director's latest film, The Boy and the Heron, Studio Ghibli executive Junichi Nishioka told CBC's Eli Glasner that the animation stalwart is still hard at work.

"Other people say that this might be his last film, but he doesn't feel that way at all," said Nishioka through a translator.

"He is currently working on ideas for a new film. He comes into his office every day and does that. This time, he's not going to announce his retirement at all. He's continuing working just as he has always done."

We should all be so lucky

Well, that was wonderful. I haven't teared up at a movie like that in a while.

Don't want to say much about it, but the animation is incredible.

just saw it! amazing. trying to settle on a favorite image to fall asleep thinking about.

#1 movie this weekend, maybe

Deservedly. A lovely watch, very slow burn in ways but that makes its success all the better. Was able to catch the subtitled version but heard good things about the dub, which has a lot of veterans of previous Ghibli dubs.

I've seen this twice now: once dubbed and once subbed. It's hard for me to articulate the way this movie hit me; I am just grateful to live in a world where it exists.

Very envious. I can't wait to see this!

It's wonderful.

beware the man-eating parakeets

I was surprised how much of this seemed to be drawn from Miyazaki's own life - it follows in that great storytelling tradition of children grappling with the horrors of the adult world through fantastical elements that reflect their turmoil.

Oh, it's out?!?!? I'm gonna go!!!

xp I also got the impression that it was quite autobiographical, on a few levels perhaps. Speaks towards creativity and world building in interesting ways, and it also felt the most "Murakami-esque" of all his films to me.

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.

btw I was referring to Haruki, not Takashi, if that wasn't already clear.

Also the architecture! So many styles, and it added so much to the surrealism

Yes! to all of the above. I watched it again this afternoon and kept noticing all the great sounds - footsteps on wooden floors, fluttering paper, things collapsing.

I haven't thought about it much in terms of 'decoding' the film. I suspect that many of the sequences (the fish gutting) are in there because they make for wonderful animation.

So yeah this was great. We did it as a family outing, my kids are huge Miyazaki fans. We were all basically entranced by it. Interesting conversation on the way home with different interpretations and speculations about meanings and symbols, but also just awe at the sensory experience of it.

This line stunned me: "'Mahito'... which means 'sincere one'. No wonder you reek of death."

Same, I've been thinking about that line constantly

And the music.

Adding to that, the stretch of silences (musically mostly) near the start is remarkable. It also reminds me about how Hishiashi added more score to some of the earlier films because that’s what American audiences expected; clearly not the case here.

Exactly. In my review I stressed Miyazaki's career-long talent for silences.

Taking the Japanese title at more-or-less face value, it seems to me that the film is its own testament to how to live — with empathy and wonder.

I suspect that many of the sequences (the fish gutting) are in there because they make for wonderful animation.

Hm, yeah, I think you’re right. Part of the ecosystem of the ocean world, where birds, fish, and human spirits seem to occupy the same cycle of consumption.

I’ve been wondering, is there a suggestion that the rowers who gather for the fish feast may eventually turn into warawara (which are something like the last, most reduced form of unborn spirit)?

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"