Clever in some ways, obvious in others. Personally quite liked the first person thing, although having just seen Nickel Boys it wasn't as effective here. Everything with the dad is quite good. Lucy Liu is great if she's supposed to be the strangest smother-ey mom ever, and she very well might be.
Much worse ways to kill 84 minutes.
Just a staggering film. The first person-thing could've been such a gimmick, but it's actually the key to the whole thing. And while it's a painful story, it never feels like it lingers in the grief and brutality - it's about the hope, resilience, and, most of all, trust between two brilliant characters.
The Boy and the Heron is the product of a master at the heights of his powers, elegiac, graceful, and deeply, deeply moving. This is possibly the Miyazaki film that demands the most from its audience, but it rewards attention boundlessly. Miyazaki's work has long made the argument for animation as a powerful storytelling device in film, and the Boy and the Heron is no exception - if anything, this film argues, successfully, that animation is perhaps the single most…
I wrote and wrote and wrote about 4,000 words about this movie. I explained that it was about the human condition, about our biases as human beings and about the way it weaved the main character's indisputably true account of her history and the clever ways it incorporated her story and life against her film roles, and how all people could stand to learn something about the way those experiences reflected back on her life. I wrote about how this…
