Anton_Klink

I love Studio Ghibli but I do remember from an interview a few years ago, how Miyazaki described his creative process. Mainly - he usually has no idea, how the story would develop or what the story even is when he starts a project. Mostly he develops story as he works on the animation, which also explains the many unfinished story threads and random turns in his previous movies - but boy was that evident in "The Boy and the Heron".

This time around the "story", if you can even call it that, just doesn't make a lick of sense - at all! The whole movie is just a succession of weird and random sequences of weird and random characters doing weird and random things, that don't make any sense whatsoever. Whatever connective tissue the story sort of has, is paper-thin and close to non-existent.

Critics have called this "dream logic" and indeed - I guess the events in the movie would "make sense" in a dream scenario, where all logic and coherence is out the window and anything goes. But when you are fully awake, watching this movie just feels like nobody dared to question the great master Miyazaki working on his swan song, as he was stringing one random hallucinatory sequence after another, free to come up whatever he wanted to and draw up any random dream sequence with no questions asked. Sure enough, all the drawn environments look beautiful, though the animated characters themselves decidedly less so. But with almost no coherent story whatsoever to follow, the over two hours of just random dream sequences becomes a really tedious watch.

As for how to Academy decided to give this the "Best Animation" award in 2024, whereas there were so many more deserving contenders (especially the eye-poppingly magnificent "Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse") - the Academy members must have either confused it for a "Lifetime Achievement" award or just voted for it without even watching the movie.

I love animated movies and I love Sam Rockwell, but this was one of the most boring, unfunny, clichéd and predictable animated movies I have ever seen. It is full of juvenile fart and butt jokes, yet not a single joke that could be enjoyed by anyone above the age of 12. For a movie that's supposed to be a comedy, I didn't even chuckle once, let alone laugh out loud and an unfunny comedy is always a pain to watch.

You know exactly what is going to happen in the next scene based on this previous scene and you know exactly how the characters are going to act, react, say and do from one scene to the next. Nothing surprising or unexpected ever happens, you can see all the plot twists coming from a 100 miles away, the life lessons the movie tries to instill are generic and a boring movie is also a pain to watch. If you've seen any amount of animated movies or even movies in general, you've seen it all before done much better in previous movies.

The premise of the world is also super confusing. I don't think I've ever seen an animated movie where animals live alongside humans as sort of proto-humans as well. How did the animals become humans? How did the humans react to animals becoming humans? In the world seemingly Inhabited mostly by humans, how did they elect a fox as the mayor? None of this is of course, ever explained or addressed.

On the positive side, the voice acting is good and the animation is at least passable but it's unfortunately that's about it.