I just watched the boy and the heron and wow, it was really, really, really bad. The entire film felt like a bunch of undercooked pitch ideas for short stories/cut content from spirited away/tales from earthsea that production just decided to loosely thread together to make a feature length film, you have the flying sperm plotline, the parokeets plotline, the wizard plotline, the meteor plotline, the magic legos plotline and the boy grieving plotline and they are barely congruent with one another.
"No you don't get it bro, its SYMBOLIC."
Yeah and that's the crux of the issue.
All the symbolism is not supplementary to the story. It IS the story, and depending on how you take that it will make or break the movie for you. There is no point in questioning any of the myriad plotholes, plot contrivances, or generalized nonsense in it relating to the plot, because the movie doesn't care about pretence.
If you take the movie literally, a kid sad that his mom died goes to a fantasy land after following a fat ugly idiot in a heron costume and after saving a bunch of flying sperm from pelicans, and interrupting his aunt's birth, learns to love his unborn sister after a wizard talking to a magic rock argues with a parokeet that came out of nowhere over a bunch of lego bricks that also came out of nowhere. It goes without saying that this isn't even trying.
So you have to take a step back and get a little figurative, its all steeped in the general theme of "moving on", and what that really means.
The protagonist choses to save the unborn instead of letting them die (except at the end he kills them all when he lets the world die anyway so???). He choses to let his younger mom go and move on, he choses to not take the lego bricks because he recognizes his own flaw, he choses to forsake the fantasy world and return to reality in the form of abandoning the childish toys.
The fantasy world is meant and ONLY meant, to represent this dichotomy of holding on vs letting go. This isn't a plot based narrative, its a theme based one.
But must there really be this hard seperation of plot and theming? I smell a false dichotomy. Let me try to put this visually.
Pretend this narrative is a cake. Everybody loves cakes, cakes have layers right?
And for a narrative cake you need a nice solid plot as the base, it can stand on its own, then ontop of that you can layer some allegory, which in this case is another way to interpret the base story, then stack on a little symbolism to enchance both intepretations below it, and if you want you can top it off with a little social commentary, and horray for you.
Myasaki put it in the oven... a little differently. He gave us a half baked story that can't hold itself up, let alone anything else, so made it equal part allegorical, then overloaded that shit with symbolism, and you know what, you still have a cake- just less of one. ᵃⁿᵈ ᵏᶦⁿᵈᵃ ˢʰᶦᵗ
For 2 hours the movie half asses a plot and connecting threads for set pieces and feels the gaps with "deeper meaning".
Like I'm not supposed to notice that the lego bricks and the parokeet king that are literally responsible for the entire setting and climax of the film showed up in the last 10 minutes with no forshadowing and zero explenation.
Or the the characters randomly gain and lose memories completely aribtrarily and time travel depending on what the plot wants with zero consistency.
Why was the maid helping the sperm instead of trying to go home?
If the world is just a made up pocket dimention playground by the uncle using the magic meteorite, why the fuck do the flying sperm become real humans in the real world?
If we're supposed to care about them being eaten because they're real people, does that mean that since the protagonist chose to let the world die at the end that no more people will be born because all the flying sperm died in it??? You can't have your cake and fuck it too.
Either we care about the flying sperm being eaten because they're real people in the real world, or we don't care about them because the protagonist destroys them all at the end anyway, but it doesn't matter because the sperm plotline that the movie spends like a third of its runtime on is dropped partway through and never brought up again, until they remember that they left the granny in the shadow realm and need to pull her back like 2 minutes before the credits roll.
Why does his younger mother have superpowers in the fantasy land but he doesn't?
Or that the wizard created this magic fantasy world, filled it with flesh eating cannibal birds, and thinks that this will somehow be enticing to a young child???
I don't care if its analogous for the innocence of childhood or adulthood ignorance or whatever the fuck.
The boy deciding to reject the fantasy world is supposed to be him "growing up" but the fantasy world is a total shithole filled with health hazards, electroshocking rocks, and cannibal birds. Why the fuck would ANYONE want to stay in it instead of running away?
Or that its still not explained why the stepmom walked into the fantasy world other than some vague prophecy about the plotline that makes zero sense when you actually start asking questions around it:
So the magic world drags people from the granduncles bloodline because it needs a sucessor... so the parokeets capture and offer the mother as a bargaining chip, but the wizard doesn't want her, he wants the protagonist which the parokeets do not capture and instead try to kill instead for some reason, and the aunt was drawn in because she's also from the bloodline, but the parokeets DON'T offer her to the wizard, instead they put her in a sacred birthing room you're not allowed to trespass in because...???
Or that the plot of saving the aunt is resolved by the mother... praying to the electrified rock out of the blue, which hasn't been established to even be a character, and the electrified rock is somehow different from the magical flying talking rock that gives the uncle his powers and... what?
It doesn't help that the big metaphor here is knuckledraggingly simplistic "HES SAD AND MUST MOVE ON", and I'm not even saying aggressive allegory/themeing is the wrong way to tell a story, I'm saying it can be lazily or incompetently done.
The boy and the heron doesn't bother with the base story, it just says "THIS IS AN ALLEGORY FOR GRIEF", tosses a bunch of surreal imagery at you, then tells you to go dumpster diving if you want anything more out of it.
I'm sorry for the movie just isn't good. It just jangles colourful keys in front of you for 2 hours, but its incredibly shallow doesn't have much to say other than being a pretty screensaver.
Studio gibli has done both allegory AND metaphor before, and they've done both without sacrificing the plot to moloch.
Nausica, Kiki, Monoke, Spirited away, Howl's castle, Arriety, they all have themes, messages, social commentary, and they accomplish it without completely forsaking the plot.
TBATH reaks of rewrites and lack of a clear vision other than an abstract "grief theme", but "abtract grief" is not a copout for lack of congruence. GRIS also does abstraction of grief with tons of symbolism and it does so while having a clear focus.
In fact GRIS is this movie but done competently, because the fantastical locations and the events in them actually relate to grief and coping with loss.
This movie is genuinely no better than earthesa. They have the exact same problems, shallow characters, incoherent plot, barely connected set pieces and a climax that only makes sense if you've read all 12 rewrites of the original script.
I mean for fucks sake, the movie is called "The Boy and the HERON" and the titular heron is only relevant for about 5 minutes of total screentime before being relegated into a pointless fat ugly comic relief character with zero bearing on the plot. And while we're at it, the fuck's going on with the heron?
His magic feathers always find their target, but if he has a hole in his beak he can't fly, and the hole can only be fixed by one who made it, and at one point the protagonist threatens to tear a random feather that fell off him in half, and that really scares him, and then the feather gets torn anyway and nothing becomes of it, and then (in the scene where they're fixing the beak) the heron tells the boy outright that he's betraying him and he can go fuck himself, but then literally a sentence later forgets he ever set it and helps the boy???
He's also the ONLY magic bird that can exist in the real world implying he transcends realities, but is also subservient to the wizard uncle that built the magic playground? And at one point they also namedrop that his only weakness is flight feather number 4 (or something along those lines) and that's never brought back up after the one scene its mentioned in where it serves no purpose.
This movie has like 30 different dropped plot points and half of them are about the heron.
But oh no, its a metaphor so it excuses literally everything, no fuck off, metaphor isn't all purpose plot insulation, you can't just say "themes" to excuse literally everything especially when the same studio has done themes without sacrificing plot before.
