Change Your Image
npg9
Ratings
Most Recently Rated
Reviews
Kimitachi wa dô ikiru ka (2023)
The Genuine and Birds
Miyazaki is back and brings animation with him.
The highly anticipated premiere of the film "How Are You?", better known to English-speaking viewers as "The Boy and the Heron," is already showing in limited cinemas days before the premiere. After his humorous departure in 2013, Hayao Miyazaki switched to a free schedule, and the new film was in production for almost ten years.
The main character, ten-year-old Mahito (or "real man"), as we learn from the opening shots, is a boy left without a mother during the war after the bombing of Tokyo in the third year of the war, whom his father, the head of an aircraft factory, takes away from the war to the wilderness of the country to an estate maintained by the father's daughter-in-law, Mahito's mother's sister, now carrying a child, and a pack of aunties and unclies hidden from the terrors of war by the daughter-in-law.
Without getting into details, Miyazaki brings to our attention the old way of life, in front of which modernity appears as a convention, and war as, if not an aggravating, then a refurbing obligation to life. Mahito is repeatedly bothered by a heron, persuading him, either it's dreams or reality, to step unto the tower to save his own mother, and Mahito, although he has doubts, goes on a strange journey through fantasy worlds, where everything is not what it seems, but in fact it is the same thing, to save not only his mother, but also her sister.
To reach the hearts of the TikTok generation Miyazaki forsakes metaphor and goes all-in with analogies. The fascist followers appear in parallel worlds as cannibalistic parrots, the bearing aunt is hidden from the cruel everyday life behind thick curtains and is filled with resentment rising from a jealousy for her dead sister's purity, and Mahito is saved from all dangers by the stubborn and no longer so impudent with a bullet-ridden beak hero(n), a fireproof a girl who, like Mahito, ran away to the tower in her youth, and a rover auntie who makes sashimi out of fish for self-inflating for a new rebirth ballies.
Miyazaki's new picture is no longer so much a parable, which the previous generation have probably missed by the tip of the tongue, but a clear anti-war catechism that guides young viewers not so much through the dream world of Miyazaki, Christ and Buddha (I think this is not it's an exaggeration to say that), but through the dream world of those very real young people who are grasping at strings in order to understand what they are and what words to build.
And it seems to me that the master succeeds in building a better one. Let's believe that the audience will succeed too.
Esshâ-dôri no akai posuto (2020)
No
I should say I feel broken now. Somehow, I've expected a little more from Sono judging by the Letterboxd hysteria. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't deliver. Red post is focused upon a Mikiesque situation when a bunch of people stumble upon an audition, and that's pretty much it. There's not as much as comedic absurdist poetry with some mood swings. If you're expecting much from this movie, please re-orient, that's not the oriental Sono I love. I should praise the camera though, it is movie, after all. Getting from Utsushimi to Hazard to Love Exposure to that, well, sometimes it clicks, but just 3 times in 10. Same thing with Sono's movies, though, was that the point.