 Studio Ghibli's back with a brand new film called The Boy in the Heron. I took my son last night and we both had thoughts. Let's talk about him. The Boy in the Heron is PG-13. It's two hours and four minutes, according to IMDB. And my son and I didn't really care for it. And that hurts to say that stings. Now, if anybody's familiar with this channel, as of lately, you might notice, okay, he didn't really care for Boy in the Heron, which is currently sitting at 97% on Rotten Tomatoes. He also didn't care for Godzilla-1. Also at 97%, maybe 98%. I don't know. Yeah, I guess I'm the outlier in both of these. I didn't set out this year to have hot takes. In fact, I'd say for the most part, I'm pretty in line with the majority of movie critics, which isn't also a badge of honor by any means. I'm just giving my opinions and my thoughts on the movie as a whole. And that's what I'm going to do here. It's up to you to decide, hey, do I think this guy is being honest and do I think he's going to align with my thoughts? I'm just giving you what I saw and you can take that for what it's worth. It might not be worth anything and that's perfectly fine. That's acceptable. So this film, again, over two hours long, slightly, that's the problem right out of the gates. It's a bizarre movie, of course. It's by the guys that made Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke. Two of the three I absolutely love. Spirited Away. I don't throw this word out often, but Masterpiece does truly come to mind when I think of that film. It's brilliant. It's breathtaking. The animation's top notch. And a lot of that stuff can be said about this new one, The Boy and the Heron. It looks gorgeous. Colorful as all can be. Beautiful animation, lovely voice work. We did see it with subtitles. That's fine. I'm sure you can find the English dub version in theaters as well. I don't know. The Wednesday showing we went to that was subtitles. The plot is loosey-goosey to go with the bird theme, which they do a lot in this film. It's about a boy. This will be spoiler-free. It's about a boy, hence the title, The Boy and the Heron, who loses his mother as the film starts. That's the centralized plot. His mom's gone to a fire, and he's going to be raised by this new woman four years later and his dad, who's never really around. He's a worker. He works for the military in a steel plant, doing a lot of the chassis's and different instrumentation weaponry needed to fight wars. This kid's fighting his own war, and that's the war of acceptance, of moving on. The thing I love about this kid is he's very resilient, he's knowledgeable, and he's able to do things on his own. He's self-sufficient. He builds tools. He learns how to conceal his emotions in front of people to stay strong and brave. He even, at one point, is willing to have... He's willing to inflict damage on himself so as he doesn't have to go to school and face more odds and more challenges. Now, I don't... Of course, I don't think anybody should inflict damage on themselves. My point is the kid does what he thinks he needs to in order to maintain his self-worth and to go on in life. As this movie progresses, it's going to get very slow for a very long portion of time. The middle of this movie suffers from its pacing so badly as the boy enters this mysterious world, a world within worlds with quirky characters and lovely visuals, and this heron is gonna be his guide on his misadventure to understand the truth about things and understand and forgive people in his life and learn to accept other people in his life. It has beauty, of course. It has amazing visuals. It has an amazing soundtrack. The music in this thing is fantastic. Voice work is fine. I'm trying not to be redundant. I can't remember what I said or not. I'm just kind of going off the hip. But what it really lacks, and this is the thing that hurts more than anything, is emotion. The emotion should be there, especially at the loss of a parent. I lost a parent, not much difference in age from this kid, so it really should have hit me in a special way than other people, and it didn't. It lingers on things that don't need to be lingered on and it pushes past things that should absolutely have focus. There are several moments in this movie where I'm ready to cry manly tears of joy or sadness or whatever and the film is glossing past them or rushing by them like they mean nothing and it sucks. As for my son, who's 11, this movie's way too vague. It's way too deep for him. It's too deep for me a lot of the times. I'm trying to listen, Spirit of the Way has tons of layer to it and I was able to pick up on those layers pretty well, I think, or at least interpret them in a way that felt comfortable and it felt, it felt good. In this movie, there's just so much to kind of dissect from scene to scene and you can really take what you want out of it, but the symbolism isn't that interesting and I don't really feel like digging that deep to understand all the complexities and the narrative that's going on because if it's not working from a surface level, if it's not engaging me enough at the top level, then I'm not willing to go any deeper for it. Now a lot of people will. Again, this is Studio Ghibli. They've done some amazing films. Most of their films I would say are works of art. They don't all work for me. I do love Kiki's Delivery Service for its slow pace and its whimsy, its childlike innocence. I didn't care for Princess Mononoke, which I know is a massive fan favorite. I thought the first half was really good, but then it just kind of, I don't know, like that one wasn't very deep at all. It was pretty obvious what was happening in that film. So I just, I was ready for the ride to be over. The Boy in the Heron is different because it really feels like it's almost a spiritual successor in some ways to spirit it away, but without all those magical elements that made that one so good. As for the characters, love the main child. The Heron's fun. He's interesting. And the second half introduces some characters that I think are hilarious. They're fun to look at. It's just really quirky in the best way possible. But again, it takes a long time to get there. And the second half felt so almost disconnected from the first half that it was like two different movies going on, fighting for attention. And at that point, I'm ready to leave. It's just too tedious. I think if this was a 90 minute movie, we'd have another very special film on our hands. But as it stands, it's just, it's just not for me. It's just mundane. And I wanted it to be done. Again, my son, who is a huge fan of not just this, but anime in general. He's a big anime guy. Loves reading the comics or the manga, whatever you call them. I'm not, anime is not my thing. Okay, I'll dabble in Dragon Ball Z on occasion. Throw in a, you know, you throw in a few different things and you'll get my interest. But I'm not sticking around for the long haul. I'm not watching 800 episodes or 1,000 episodes of One Piece or whatever that is. I do like these movies though. So this one hurts. This hurts me that again, it's like, oh, 97%. It's brilliant. It's genius. Is it though? Is it though? I question sometimes the motives of some of the critics out there, whether they just give everything a pass because it has a name associated to it, like an A24 movie or Pixar back in the day when they were untouchable. Now it seems like people are okay, giving them some knocks when they deserve it or when they think it's earned. And I just don't operate that way. It doesn't matter what name is associated to it. That might draw me in more. That might peak my interest more. But I'm not giving it a pass if I'm seeing in the theater feeling like I kind of threw my money away. And this time I did feel like that. You know, I draw money for my son. We had popcorn in the whole shebang and it just, my son actually turned me. He's like, how much is left? That's brutal. I don't want to hear that. I don't want to hear that. And I was thinking it too. All right. I'm not going to ramble any longer. Those are my thoughts on The Boy and the Heron. Of course, it gets all the production stuff knocked down to a T, visually beautiful, audio's gorgeous. I'm sure the soundtrack you could find at the score on Spotify or something and blast that bad boy and it would sound fantastic because those were definitely, definitely fantastic for me. Let me know if you saw this already or if you're interested or if I turned you off. Please don't let me sully your enjoyment or your opportunity to go see it. If you're a fan of the studio, again, Ron Tomatoes has this very high. If you take anything that site has with value, then you'll get something there. IMDb, I'm sure is scoring this well. I haven't looked yet. I was let down. Not when I would recommend. Maybe check it out in streaming. But again, just my thoughts. Let me know. Like the video if you had a good time. Please subscribe if you haven't. I post tons of movie reviews every single week. We'd love to have you stick around. If you really like what I'm doing, Patreon or YouTube join. The join button's right there. You hit it. You get access to exclusive videos. Same with Patreon. There's a $1 tier and that really helps the channel sustain itself. Helps me get motivated to keep doing this. All right. Thanks for watching. Hopefully I see you next time.