i know we all go feral over coney island but GENUINELY. some lightening bolt of creativity shot down from the skies and joined these powerhouse artists together so that they could craft a perfect melody and prose that makes my bones ache and my heart break and my eyes well up and my soul leave my body. i think about the second verse at least once a day. it is a revelation every single time that i listen to them harmonise “a universe away”. i understand something deep within myself in the closing chorus when i hear them sing “the sight that flashed before me was your face/when the sun goes down”. they truly captured something poignant and fundamental and human and every single piece of praise that people give it is more than well deserved
Ok. So, just saw The Boy and the Heron a second time.
I’m going to talk through some thoughts.
So, leaving the theater, my mom asked “but why was the Parakeet King Mussolini?”
And.
Ok, so the movie is about grief. But it’s also about loss and change and impermanence. People are impermanent. Places are impermanent. Systems too are impermanent. The world is impermanent and nothing, no legacy or heirs or descendents can make these things last beyond their due time. (How fitting that Hime holds the power of fire. What better holds the duality of change than fire?)
The Parakeets, always hungry, are living in a dying world. They are desperate to save it, to preserve it, keep it from changing. (In the end, they are changed, released into the world still alive but different. Will they be happier in the real world? The Pelicans surely will be. Does it matter of they are happier so long as they are still alive?)
Fascism, in its rhetoric, often preaches about protecting a mythic past, making your nation great again, preserving, conserving values and systems and power- being against “progress for the sake of progress.”
So the Parakeets are fascist. Even when the Parakeet King gains power- grabs the blocks to try to keep the world as it is, he fails. He makes the world crumble even faster, in fact, in his attempts to gain power.
Right?
I’m still sorting through a lot of the stuff in the movie. (The glass pilot cockpits in the house that look like coffins. Hime being held in a glass coffin like Snow White. The warawara. God the warawara. How hime protects them but burns some of them to save the rest. The way the pelicans are always hungry. The Parakeets are always hungry. Ugh so many thoughts.)
The Boy And The Heron Is the first movie that instead of saying “the world we’re giving you Is fucked up and horrible and it’s up to you to fix it” went “i cannot balance this world anymore because im old and my time has come, so im giving you the choice to be my successor as the peacemaker or war instigator and i think you’re worthy of… nevermind the fascist bird fucked it completely. go live your best mundane life and be happy to have loved ones” and i think thats beautiful
“i’ll be so lucky to have you” is such a beautiful line. himi knowingly returns to a world that is destined to consume her in the fires she holds dear, all because they’re also the very doors that’ll bring mahito into existence.
and that’s the enduring essence of miyazaki’s works: life, through all its suffering and misery, is still worth living. through the people we love and the memories we cherish, we search for and find our reasons to live.
