I watched The Boy and the Heron aka How Do You Live? today, managing to catch the last subtitled showing on any screen in town. This is by far Hayao Miyazaki's most complex and challenging film.
Unlike many of his other young protagonists, the stoic and troubled Mahito remains a mystery for much of the runtime, revealing very little of his interiority even as he behaves in shocking ways, so that learning how he feels about his whole situation is one of the film’s many evolving enigmas. And there’s certainly plenty of enigmas: if you take the advice of going in knowing nothing about the movie except who made it, as I did, you might not even know what genre of movie it is until nearly halfway through. The metaphor of the whole piece is so multifaceted, understated, and ambiguous that you’d hardly believe it got a wide release anywhere, let alone abroad; yet it’s so lightly and charmingly presented that you can let it all just wash over you, rather than feel a need to solve the puzzle in order to appreciate it.
Also, it's incredibly gorgeous.
Unlike many of his other young protagonists, the stoic and troubled Mahito remains a mystery for much of the runtime, revealing very little of his interiority even as he behaves in shocking ways, so that learning how he feels about his whole situation is one of the film’s many evolving enigmas. And there’s certainly plenty of enigmas: if you take the advice of going in knowing nothing about the movie except who made it, as I did, you might not even know what genre of movie it is until nearly halfway through. The metaphor of the whole piece is so multifaceted, understated, and ambiguous that you’d hardly believe it got a wide release anywhere, let alone abroad; yet it’s so lightly and charmingly presented that you can let it all just wash over you, rather than feel a need to solve the puzzle in order to appreciate it.
Also, it's incredibly gorgeous.