I watched this on the 2nd of January, 2025.
It’s a really classic Ghibli, and I enjoyed it a lot. The story is … really hard to describe, but essentially it’s about a boy who moves with his father out of Tokyo to a small village after his mother dies in the war. There, he is bedevilled with a grey heron, bent on getting him to go to his master’s domain, an old tower in the woods. Once he enters the tower, many … strange … things happen.
Apart from the good old themes of war as devastation and coming to terms with grief, something I particularly liked about this one was its embrace of mystery. Watching the movie required “being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”. Questions abound, strange figures come and go, actions seem to have no reason and off-screen consequence. All in all, a wonderful evocation of the experience of being a child in a strange, illogical world dominated by beings beyond your ken.
Another aspect was the gorgeous art - every scene was lush and detailed, in scintillating and subtle shades, enamoured of ornament and flourish, as always. The depictions of natural scenes were lovingly done, embodied with sublimity and presence in what I think is the vein of the Shinto tradition (but I might be entirely wrong). A nice note (and which is true of all Ghibli) is that while the backdrops had fractal detail, the characters were cut with clean lines and even tones. This is probably because they’re easier to animate that way, but I’d also like to think that they represent a philosophy of storytelling: the setting is fleshed-out, surreal, detailed, while the characters are clean archetypes, whirling on their predestined paths. This also gels nicely with the occasional scene you might recognise, of a character in close-up, with grotesque detail as something is revealed. It is in these moments that the archetypes are dropped and the nuance of character is revealed, reflected in the changed art style.
I loved that particular scene with the rock hanging immobile next to the wizard of the tower. It incongruously reminded me of that Adams quote about “…hanging in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t”, except with more gravitas.
There were actually lots of excellent little details dotted around the movie, each of which could branch off into a rabbit hole. The clean Platonic-style solids the wizard uses to create a complex fractal world, the interstitial spaces, the lingering questions about the rock and the tower, the presence of the people in the underworld, the identity of the heron, the list goes on.
Things I didn’t like about the movie: it takes a good long while to get going, which yeah I appreciate for the atmosphere but also like come on. Also I watched in Japanese with English subtitles and the voice acting was so over-the-top sometimes it broke disbelief. But these are niggling qualms, it was a very good watch.