There’s something Aristotle said in his Poetics about the effective use of metaphor. Boiling it down, he observed that while coming up with metaphors takes genius, overstuffing your story with beautiful — but confusing — symbols doesn’t leave you with a timeless piece of art. Instead, you end up with “nothing but riddles or gibberish.”
Apparently, no one told Hayao Miyazaki.
Even more than his earlier movies, the Studio Ghibli founder’s newest — and once again, after feigning retirement a decade ago, head-fake “last” — is a lesson in puzzling weirdness, stemming from virtually every aspect of its making.
That movie, The Boy and the Heron,
