00:01
The thing I didn't know about Studio Ghibli was they have a nursery school.
That's cool.
They have Studio Ghibli Nursery School.
I feel like the kids who get to go there are like really gonna be grateful for it later in their lives.
Yeah, only the employees' kids can go there.
They have a cat bus at this nursery school, don't they?
Oh, that would be awesome!
You know it.
That's probably like...
There's probably a cat bus that comes around to pick you up from your actual house.
Oh my god.
At Studio Ghibli Nursery School.
Konnichiwa! I am your host Mayu for 2AM OTTACK!
In this podcast, we talk all about anime, manga, movies, music, and history through our distinct perspectives.
As a born and raised Japanese non-otaku, that's me, and an American anime fan.
That's me.
What was that?
I don't know, I just got bored, like doing the same way every time.
Okay, alright.
Mix it up.
Could it be a new thing?
No.
Well, you know.
Alright, welcome back to 2AM OTTACK!
宮崎駿の新作映画
Today, we are going to talk about a very, very famously known animated film.
Is it that famous, though?
I'm worried that it's not as famous as some of the other ones.
Okay, let me introduce.
This film received critical acclaim and has grossed $292.2 million worldwide.
Wow, that is a lot of money.
Sounds like it, yeah.
Making it the 5th highest-grossing Japanese film of all time.
Wow.
The film won Best Animated Feature Film at the Academy Awards.
I remember cheering for it, even though I had not actually seen it yet.
Oh, yeah, it doesn't matter.
Yeah.
I mean, yeah, that's true.
So, today we are going to talk about...
The Boy and the Heron, or Kimi Tachi wa Dou Ikiru Ka?
Clearly, the titles are very different in Japanese and in English,
because Kimi Tachi wa Dou Ikiru Ka is How Do You Live?
Boy and the Heron explains a lot more of what the movie is kind of about
for at least a portion of the film,
whereas How Do You Live is the title of one of the books that's in his room
and he reads at some point, right?
Yeah, but it's not an adaptation.
Yeah, and I gotta tell you,
neither of those titles explain what this movie is about.
Right.
Even a little bit.
If they wanted to try to explain what the movie was about,
it would be called The Boy Who Went to Another Deeply Weird Dimension,
or something like that.
Yeah, or In Another World.
Sorry, I love the idea of a Miyazaki movie that's called...
I was reincarnated in another world ruled by a crazy magician
and a bunch of parakeets.
You would be like, no, I'm not watching this.
That's why they named it The Boy and the Heron.
We're ready to talk about this, yeah?
映画の奇妙さ
This movie was so weird.
I thought I was used to Miyazaki movies getting weirder each time he makes one,
but this one really took the cake.
I'm going to admit right up front,
I fell asleep in the middle of this movie,
so it might be the case that my take on it is a little bit less educated than usual,
because I for sure don't understand what happened in the middle part of the film.
I felt like my brain was confused,
and it led to somewhere my brain couldn't catch up.
Processing.
Yes, it was a little bit...
Maybe I shouldn't go there.
映画の不思議な世界
But yeah, this movie was very, very strange,
especially because the first part of the movie made so much sense.
It was like just The Chronicles of Narnia for a little while, right?
Kid during the war loses mom, gets sent to the countryside,
the countryside has some mysterious junk in it that can transport you to another dimension.
So far, so good, right?
Then he gets to the other dimension, and it is so much weirder than you expect.
I mean, those animal characters are cute, which is a plus,
but after I watched the film, I felt I should go back and try to figure it out by myself again.
Yeah, whereas I just started googling things on the internet,
and it's like, oh, that's what it's trying to say.
Yeah, but it's basically a little bit based on Hayao Miyazaki's life.
According to producer Toshio Suzuki,
The Boy and the Heron is the most expensive film ever produced in Japan.
Wait, what?
It took a long time to make this film.
But why was it so expensive?
スタジオジブリの魅力
They just paid a lot of money to the animators?
I mean, I'm down for that, but like...
Yeah, I think so.
Okay, well, you know, good for them.
Yeah, the screenplay draws heavily from Miyazaki's childhood
and explores themes of coming of age
and coping with a world marked by conflict and loss.
Sort of, okay.
Yeah, so I guess he hired a lot of animators,
or he already has a lot of animators at Studio Ghibli.
The thing I didn't know about Studio Ghibli was they have a nursery school.
That's cool.
They have Studio Ghibli Nursery School.
I feel like the kids who get to go there are really going to be grateful for it later in their lives.
Yeah, only the employees' kids can go there.
But they have a cat bus at this nursery school, don't they?
Oh, that would be awesome.
You know it.
There's probably a cat bus that comes around to pick you up from your actual house
to take you to Ghibli Nursery School.
Like, our generation is Studio Ghibli generation, I think.
It's a dream.
And, you know, there's like a Studio Ghibli museum in Mitaka, right?
And then you can go there and be immersed in the Studio Ghibli world.
And then they have a cat bus, but only kids can go in.
And I, who's 40, who grew up with Ghibli watching Totoro,
it's a dream.
You imagine what it's like being in the furry, warm, flying cat bus.
It's a dream that you can't go.
Yeah, it's like a really refined form of torture.
Yeah, it's like, can I go back to child and just try to ride on it?
Anyway, so the nursery school is called Sanbiki no Kuma no Ie.
That's terrifying.
Why?
I'm pretty sure in the original version of Goldilocks, she just gets eaten at the end.
Oh, really?
Maybe not.
Maybe I'm just making that up.
But I feel like still.
Based on the book.
I mean, yeah, I don't know how I feel about that.
I don't know how I feel about that.
The whole Goldilocks story is about lying over and over again.
I can't remember.
Yeah, the bears come home and they're like, what the hell?
Who ate my porridge and slept in my bed and broke my chair and stuff?
And Goldilocks is like, teehee.
I invaded your house while you were gone and broke all your things.
Oh.
音楽と感情
I don't know.
That's unique.
At least the name is cute.
The name is very cute.
Yeah.
The nursery school is located near Studio Ghibli.
That's pretty cool.
Yeah.
Anyway, I like the music.
I like the ending music, too.
Yeah.
Which was written by Kenshi Yonezu.
It was a weird choice.
It's a real departure from the other Studio Ghibli films, right?
That's true.
That's true.
Hayao Miyazaki found Yonezu Kenshi's song.
He heard Paprika right before Tokyo Olympics.
It was overplayed on TV.
Especially on NHK.
Everybody could sing.
And then producer Toshio Suzuki heard Hayao Miyazaki singing the song at the nursery school.
So that's how it went.
So that's why they picked him.
All right.
Fair enough.
And for Yonezu, the Ghibli film was very effective.
Just like literally every other Japanese person.
But yes.
That's true.
When Yonezu was asked to make a theme song, brought a demo to Miyazaki.
He was nervous.
Super nervous.
No doubt.
He felt like he was about to go on the stage that you get killed.
Oh, an execution platform.
Yeah.
That's how he felt.
Wow.
And then Hayao Miyazaki listened to the music and he started crying.
Oh, that's awesome.
I know.
I know.
Yonezu did anime theme songs.
For example, My Hero Academia.
Right.
He did Peace Sign.
Yep.
And what was that?
Chainsaw Man.
Chainsaw Man.
Yeah.
Kickback.
Kickback.
Yeah.
Which is dope.
Yeah.
象徴とテーマ
And then in the movie, in the anime, there's a gate or some kind of entrance with alphabets written.
Yeah.
Which I didn't understand it.
Yeah.
So it says, Fece mi la divina potestate, which means divine power made me in Italian.
And it's from Dante's Inferno.
So it's one of the inscriptions on the gates of hell.
And I think it's a pretty straightforward meaning because you find out later that the dimension that they're going into or whatever is made by the magic of the great uncle or whoever that read all the books and figured out how to be a wizard.
It's interesting to wonder whether the place that he goes in the other dimension is hell.
Right.
There's a lot of death symbolism.
There's the dolman that symbolism is everywhere with the rocks that form graves and stuff.
And I'm pretty sure one of the characters refers to one of the parts as a graveyard.
The parakeets are all kind of evil, right?
They're eating meat and cutting people up and sacrificing.
But also they look kind of stupid.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Kind of just followers who repeat stuff.
And the king parakeet who gets referred to as Duke is pretty clearly a fascist.
Definitely got some Mussolini vibes going on from that guy.
He tries to unite everybody around force and violence and stuff in order to try to keep things going.
It doesn't work.
So there's definitely an anti-war critique in there or a critique of Japan's conduct during the war under the fascist military.
It feels very jumbled together.
And again, look, I fell asleep during the movie.
I don't feel like I can speak to its symbolism really persuasively.
But the idea of one great leader will solve all the problems is pretty decisively rejected by the film.
映画のテーマと背景
Both because the great uncle, who has a lot of connections to the Meiji government, who thought,
hey, we can make everything perfect by ourselves.
And then created a system that was ripe for a military coup and takeover,
led by strong men who promised to save everything with military force and violence.
And the boy rejecting that and refusing to perpetuate it by using his talents and power in service of this fake world that's run by individual authority figures.
Choosing to go back to post-war Japan, where his mom's dead and things kind of suck,
probably does say a lot about who Miyazaki is and how he decided to use his power and talent and what he decided to bend those talents in service of.
Rejecting fascism and those sort of dreams of a perfect world where Japan is militarily strong and stuff.
And instead choosing peace, even though it comes with some suffering.
That sounds deep.
Yeah. Well, 50% of that is me having read a Reddit board and been like, oh.
But I pulled some of that. I mean, I got the Duce stuff from just watching the film and seeing the parakeet king or whatever.
His mom's name is Himi, right?
So she's obviously Himiko. She's this Shinto deity, a queen from the ancient past who had control of fire, right?
That's why she's got all her fire magic that she's using and stuff.
And her as a young girl being powerful seems bound up in the fascist state's embrace of state Shinto, right?
The way that they really built up those ideas around the Kojiki and the original Japanese Shinto myths as part of their own mythos.
And that also gets let go at the end of the movie, right?
Instead of being reunited with his mom, she goes back to her timeline and he goes back to the world where she's dead, right?
Where the emperor has renounced his divine power and everything else.
A little cool tie-in to Shinto there with her character.
And then I don't really get what's going on with the other lady who comes with him, the grandma.
Who comes with him to the other world reluctantly and then is a young person over in the other world.
She helps him a lot in the other world and stuff.
And I have no idea really what's going on with his aunt.
Why did she choose to go there and have her baby there?
And what's happening when he goes into the room?
Well, she was screaming, I don't like you.
What does it mean?
To him?
Yeah.
I mean, there's some interpersonal conflict between them, obviously.
Because she's his aunt and also married his dad and is now having a new baby that's going to be a stepbrother.
That's complicated for anybody, right?
That's some family drama of, do I accept you as my new mom?
He's been kind of a pain in the ass for her, right?
I don't think so.
I mean, he hurt himself.
I just feel like she's clearly under an enormous amount of stress and trying to be his new mom.
And he is really standoffish with her and clearly doesn't like her and doesn't want to let her into his life.
But he doesn't really show it.
He's not rebellious or anything.
He was trying to be polite.
Yeah, he shows it in very Japanese ways, though, I feel like.
So, yeah, I mean, I don't really understand why she ran away.
宮崎駿とその家族の影響
I couldn't figure out if it was like, did she get possessed and brought there?
Did she go there of her own free will?
Did she know what she was in for when she went into the other world?
I didn't really understand her storyline very well or why she would want to go there to give birth to the new baby.
I guess, I mean, maybe some of it is about her reluctance to embrace the new Japan, right?
The Japan after the war, where she doesn't really want to have to face that reality either.
I mean, the dad is an arms manufacturer, which is like...
That's something I can connect with.
Miyazaki Hayao's dad.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
Who worked on the Zeros or whatever.
Yeah.
I mean, I think that's got to be really complicated for Miyazaki, you know,
to understand that his family made money off of weapons of war.
That's tricky for anybody.
I think the stuff with the dad for me was the most complicated part of the movie.
It was like, how does he feel about his dad, right?
And how does that tie into his decision to go back to the real world?
There don't really seem to be consequences for that, ethically or not.
I don't know. That part was weird.
I also didn't understand why so many old people lived at their house.
Is that his dad just being a good community member
and taking care of the aged people in the community
by being like, just live at my palatial estate?
I mean, the house they lived in was humongous.
Right. Were they all servants, I guess?
I think so.
From old ancestors to ancestors.
Right.
Because they clearly knew what happened about the tower.
Right, right, right.
Because Ant was telling something about the tower to the main character, Mahito.
Which was not true.
And so is it the dad's family's house or the mom's family's house?
It's got to be the mom's family, right?
Mom's, yeah.
And so is the dad Amuko, or is he independently rich and just married in?
It was not clear.
But I feel like it would make more sense if he was Amuko, right?
Who married rich, and that's why they're at his wife's house.
Yeah.
But it's kind of, I mean, and I guess also if he's Amuko,
it makes more sense that he married his dead wife's younger sister
to stay in the family.
Because I think if you're Amuko and your spouse dies,
you're not the Amuko anymore, right?
And so they were like, well, let's marry him to the next sister,
and then he'll still be our adopted child, right?
I don't know.
I feel like that's some family trauma that would be rich for any story, right?
Yeah, I mean, it has a lot to say about the war, I guess.
And it has a lot to say about personal grief and loss
and making peace with the way things are
and choosing morally to walk forward instead of to try to exist
in a solipsistic, separate dimension by yourself and stuff.
But also there were parts, just the connections, to me,
often felt very tenuous and really random.
What about the wada-wada part?
The little things coming up to the upper world,
and then they become humans, born as humans.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that's like a reincarnation thing.
This is the part that I feel like I understood the least.
作品の象徴と解釈
Yeah, but as they were going up, they needed some energy,
some food to go up to the sky.
And when finally they were up in the sky,
pelicans came and started eating, like Pac-Man.
I have no idea what that was about.
There was a part, an old pelican wounded on the ground,
and then Mahito was trying to kill it.
And he explained, we used to have more food in the ocean or something,
but there's no food for us, that's why we are eating wada-wada.
I mean, maybe it's an ecological issue.
Yeah, to be like the natural world is falling apart,
but it's because humans have harmed it in the first place or something.
I don't know, there are all those ships that are sailing
through the ocean of the parallel universe,
and they're all dead people or something, right?
Something like that.
That's what I'm saying.
I feel like there was a lot of imagery in this movie
that I was just not awake enough to process fully,
and it felt like it was trying to say a lot of different things
at the same time, which is fine.
I think it was a very deep movie, it was really interesting,
but some of it kind of went over my head, and I don't know.
I feel like the earlier Ghibli movies are easier to process,
and this one has a lot of interesting symbolism,
but also is going in a lot of different directions at the same time.
Yeah, I grew up watching Ghibli from the Valley of Nazca.
It was a little bit scary for little kids.
I didn't fully understand the plot,
but after I grew up and watched it again,
like, oh, okay, I understood it.
As a kid, I still liked it.
There were some fun parts of eating the red fruit.
It looks super, super sour.
When you're a kid, you're very imaginative.
Almost you can feel it by watching.
And my neighbor Totoro was fun.
It was a little bit scary, again, in some parts.
Losing somebody is not a thing you get excited about.
Yeah, but Totoro has really cute characters,
Totoro himself, and the little Totoros,
and then Makuro Kurosuke is so much fun.
And then Spirit Away, amazing.
And then Princess Mononoke has deep meaning.
Deep meaning, but you can tell.
Princess Mononoke is very accessible.
It's not like it's all a giant metaphor,
and there's four different metaphoric levels happening at once.
There's only one level.
It's about ecology, and that's it.
And so it's pretty easy to parse and understand
without having to get all the references.
And I feel like the first one where I didn't understand
what it was trying to say anymore was Howl's Moving Castle,
which I understand is based on a book
that is by a woman from England or something?
I've never watched it fully.
That's the only movie I haven't watched.
My point is, that's the first one where,
it's very visually interesting,
but if you were like, what is Howl's Moving Castle about?
I would be like, I don't know.
I can tell you the plot, but what was it trying to say?
I am not sure.
I think it's an anti-war film.
That's all I got.
And Ponyo isn't really trying to say anything, right?
A little bit of like grillball war makeup, maybe?
Maybe.
I think that one's just kind of a straightforward love story.
物語の解釈
It's like a fairy tale, you know?
It's very cute, but I don't think it has
a lot of different layers to it.
I think it's just a story.
Wind Rises?
Yeah, don't get me started.
Wind Rises is a non-fiction story, right?
Yeah, I don't know.
Isn't it just about his dad, basically?
Based on, yeah.
His dad's life?
It doesn't have any magical realism elements.
I don't think there is a metaphor.
It's just a dude and his life.
I think it was supposed to be his retirement movie.
They were all supposed to be his retirement movie.
Didn't he say he wasn't going to make anything else after Howl?
I don't know.
I'm telling you, there's been like five
since he said he was going to retire.
I think this one was a success, right?
I feel like I still don't understand
what was going on with the heron in this movie.
Did we ever get a satisfactory explanation
for what the hell?
I don't know.
Was it a human?
Was it a heron?
A combine?
Half?
Right, exactly.
That's my challenge with this film.
It felt very all over the place.
Not in a bad way all the time,
but to a greater extent than I expected,
it didn't really make sense.
Yeah.
It felt like its symbolism was everywhere.
It was not a very holistically,
all the messages are about this thing.
It was like I had a bunch of ideas
and I put them all in the movie.
Artsy in a way.
Very artsy in a way, yeah.
We'll see what's going to happen next to his work.
Yeah.
He still seems to be going strong.
I think however much I may have been confused
by this film,
it's a very great work of art,
just like most of his other movies.
I think it was trying to say something,
and so I really appreciate that.
I should probably just watch it again
when I'm less tired
and try to really appreciate what it's going for
and then be like,
oh, it's brilliant.
ドルメンの紹介
Okay, let's do Word of the Day.
Okay.
What shall we do?
Maybe that Word of the Day is dolmen
because that's a thing I think most people don't know.
I don't think it's used in the film at all,
but there is a dolmen in the graveyard
that he arrives at in the other world.
Dolmen are just like stone structures,
usually two stones holding up a flat stone
going across them,
and they're found all over the world.
There are famous examples of dolmen in Ireland
and also in Korea and Japan,
so they're like a worldwide phenomenon,
but they can't have been made
by people from the same culture.
Clearly, many different cultures came up to this idea
of constructing these things separately,
and they're usually graves,
although I guess we don't know that 100% for sure.
Maybe people got buried there after it served
whatever function it was going to have,
but I just think it's interesting
that around the world,
humans chose to erect these megalithic structures,
often to mark people being dead,
and this movie is very fascinated
with the concept of being dead
and being dead or being alive
or transitioning between those two spaces.
I really liked the dolmen as images in the movie,
and it's also a vocabulary term
映画『君と竜と』の視点
that I don't think is very common,
so it's not even Japanese,
but that's my word of the day.
That's great. Cool one.
Nailed it.
Would you like to add anything?
I just reserve the right
to completely change my opinion about this movie
once I've watched it
all the way through while I'm awake
and more attentive.
It might be possible
that I'll listen to this episode later
and be like,
what was I thinking?
How did I fail to appreciate
the genius of this masterpiece?
So yeah, if you listen to this
and you're like,
you suck,
then just blame it on me being tired.
So in the United States,
you can watch The Boy and the Heron
on Macs right now.
Okay, cool.
And then on Netflix,
you can watch in 190 countries
except for Japan and the United States.
This is an international podcast,
so I feel good about saying that.
So people can easily watch Singapore or Canada.
Yeah, they speak English there too.
Right, right.
So check it out
and then in the United States,
where else we can check?
The local library.
That's right.
Oh yeah.
They have DVD or Blu-ray
or some kind of disc.
Cool.
You can borrow it for free
with your own library card
as far as I know on LAPL.
Right on.
Yeah, so check the film out.
Thank you so much for listening
to this week's episode.
If you liked this week's episode,
please give us five stars on Spotify
and Apple Podcasts
or like and leave a comment on YouTube.
Make sure to subscribe
and follow 2AMO Talk
and 3AMO Talk.
It'll keep us making more fun episodes.
See you next time for more 2AMO Talk.
