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The Boy and the Heron sure was… something. I wouldn't even be able to give anyone a summary of the story. So many things happened one after another for, what seemed like, absolutely no reason?


I didn't know anything about the premise beforehand- And by the time the movie was over, I still didn't know anything about it, or what I even watched it for. Why should I have cared about the characters, what they were doing, and what happened to them? The movie hardly shows anything about the motivations behind Mahito's actions, or many details about his relationships with anyone else. Alright, well in some genres, ... the plot is more the main focus than the characters. But things happened without any explanations, and it was not very interesting because it wasn't clear what... anything was supposed to be. There were some different sections to the movie, but none of them seemed to fit together in any way. You get thrown into one thing after another before getting a chance to figure anything out. 


A quick mention to the slightly better parts: It had great animation with a lot of dynamic shots and movement, and nice colors that fit the environments. The soundtrack was alright, and I could notice a main theme that played throughout the movie. The voice acting (I watched the sub) was fine, nothing that blew me away.


I suppose the main chunk of the story is that Mahito goes to find his aunt who suddenly got taken away to Some Other World. A talking gray heron appears and guides him through the strange place. But why did his aunt end up there? What even was the other world, or the heron? That's hardly all of the questions this movie leaves unanswered. A lot (or too much) was only implied, where you have to figure things out yourself. There are certainly ways that ideas can be conveyed without dialogue or directly telling the audience, but nothing ended up being comprehensible... And in some stories, you don't even need to know the answers to everything, and it's left a mystery, but there was far too much missing. So either I'm stupid, or the movie really was just confusing in every way. It was 2 hours of something, just, some thing… It felt as if the writer made a long list of ideas for a movie- too many, in fact… and then threw all the pieces into a blender, hoping something organized and coherent would come out of it, like trying to finish a story before even getting past the brainstorming phase. The end result was something that flew off in too many directions at once. There needed to be a central idea and purpose to the movie.


Important things to know while writing a script might be "Why did this happen? Does it seem like this character would do that? Why do they care about what they care about? What is the point of this story- to show change and development in a character, or have an entertaining plot? Or something else?" But in this movie, I could not see a faint inkling of an answer to any of these. 


I would rather have watched a mediocre, unoriginal adventure movie, than one that didn't even make sense. It's important for a story to coherently show what is happening, what the characters want, and why they want it. Even if the reasons for those things are extremely generic, it's better than having no clear reason at all. This film really had nothing that made me care about it. I felt no emotions while watching it (except for boredom as I struggled to stay awake in the middle). Not impressed, and disappointed.