Bawled my fucking eyes out again!!!
Trying to nail down this movie's reference points about love, loss, being young, growing old, making art, letting go, fascism, Westernization, or anything else feels kind of like a futile effort. It's not that I don't think there are concrete parallels you can draw, it's that the text is so rich with metaphor and so deeply emotionally resonant that I think you can pull thousands of meanings from hundreds of moments and the connections between them. I think you could call this movie unfocused and I couldn't call you wrong, but the subject matter here is of such staggering breadth and rich detail that I feel content to find my own points of focus, my own way of figuring out how to live.
One other thing I want to mention is that Joe Hisaishi's work here is incredible, very different from a lot of his other work with Miyazaki. Sparse, contemplative, minimalistic, but still with the same capacity to stir wonder that he has always had. I also appreciated the amount of time there wasn't music in this movie, and the stellar work of the foley artists on this project really helped those quiet moments shine.
