The Boy and the Heron – 6.5

This hand-drawn animated feature by the 83-year-old Hayao Miyazaki, purportedly the “most expensive film” ever made in Japan, is visually breathtaking. The movie’s first half, when young Mahito is taken to the country estate of his new mother, captures everything I saw and felt in my high-school summer in Japan, with a landscape from Yoshida or Hasui. The second half, a fantastical journey through an underworld that is less Japanese and more Wizard of Oz, grew repetitive and tiresome and would have improved by being cut a half-hour. There are messages about peace, love and understanding stitched in near the end, but they don’t feel deserved. Again, the “real world” is compelling; the land of pelicans and parakeets not so much. The music–a series of songs more than a score–is equally enchanting.