Film of the Year: The Boy and the Heron

The Boy and the Heron poster

Honorables mention:

Yötön Yö poster Killers of the Flower Moon poster

I find it kind of amusing that one of my runners-up this year is a surreal dreamscape that communicates its point almost entirely through unspoken imagery and the other is a meticulously humane investigation of a historical atrocity as it resonates through the lives of those who exist within it, because The Boy and the Heron is kind of the perfect mixture of both. A surefire way to hook me on any piece of art is to deploy experimental or abstract techniques in service of the larger design of the work, and this film does so spectacularly. It hones the beauty of Ghibli films to a point and drives it home, without ever being less than exciting.

Honestly, I spent most of this year despairing at the possibility of finding anything I could happily stand behind as my film of the year. There were movies I enjoyed well enough, but nothing I really loved. Even Yötön Yö, which I do appreciate a lot, would have been bit embarrassing as a film produced to exist in a video game. I'm immensely relieved that both The Boy and the Heron (as an aside: that's an awful name, they should have just translated How Do You Live?) and Killers of the Flower Moon came in swinging hard at the very end.

Game of the Year: Void Stranger

Void Stranger poster

Honorable mention:

Armored Core VI poster

Now this was a real horse race. I went into Armored Core VI unsure if the mech combat was going to click with me, but I came out of it hooting and hollering, totally confident that it had clinched my game of the year. From Software titles already made a real strong showing in my historical games of the years list, and I was (and remain!) truly head over heels for this one.

But Void Stranger hit me like a brick to the head. When people were first telling me about it, I was only lightly interested—I've enjoyed metapuzzle games like Tunic and Outer Wilds plenty, but as fun as they are for my brain they'd never burrowed deep enough into my heart to overshadow the magnitude with which Armored Core VI got my blood pumping. I didn't expect Void Stranger to be any different.

It was very different.

The structure of a metapuzzle game is always a carefully designed sequence of revelations, moments where you recontextualize everything you thought you knew about the game world. Void Stranger folds this structure into and around the emotional core of the game: as you experience a flash of insight about the mechanics of the world, it also illuminates the world's heart and that of its inhabitants. The game guides you to think about its puzzles from all angles and then rewards you for thinking about its characters the same way with a deeper and more touching understanding of them.

Void Stranger was also a game that I experienced in community, a context that is inseparable from my appreciation of it. I collaborated on the hardest metapuzzles with one friend, carefully doled out hints of just the right vaguery for another, and talked deeply about the symbolic and emotional meaning behind the game with a third. That the game can give rise to such a collaborative experience speaks well of it, and that it did for me cements it as my game of the year.

Book of the Year: Her Majesty the Prince

Her Majesty the Prince cover mockup

Okay, this one is cheating in a few ways. The book is still actively being written, it's not going to be fully published in 2023, and worst of all I'm a creative collaborator on it. But these are my oaties and I get to do what I want! (Besides, I don't usually read books the year they're published unless the author's name is "Becky Chambers".)

And Her Majesty the Prince really did have a profound effect on me this year. The first chapter pierced my heart so deep that I messaged Zandra to gush about her characters. From there, the growing complexity pathos of Lou's relationship with the Prince offered me both joy and catharsis. At the same time, my relationship with the creative end deepened, going from fan to beta reader to collaborator.

This book is now by far the biggest piece of art I've contributed substantially to. That means that this year was the year I became creatively active in a way I really never had before. I dearly love what Zandra's created and the chance I've had to help out with it, and continuing to work on it is one of the things I'm most excited for in 2024.


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in reply to @nex3's post:

i have been saying that about the title of the boy and the heron forever now! "how do you live?" is so much more evocative than "the boy and the heron", and i am convinced the department responsible for marketing ghibli films has decided they need to hook the disney movie crowd (cf. "Princess Mononoke", which makes it sound like it's a movie about a princess named Mononoke)