After all my fretting and pontificating lately about the small size of cinema audiences recently, it was a bit of a surprise to turn up to the first afternoon show of 2024 and find it well on the way to selling out – more than just nicely full, we were at the 'having to either see the film from the extreme ends of the front few rows or sit next to a complete stranger' level of capacity. I suppose I shouldn't grumble too much about this, but the little tables on the end of the armrests just represent another place for the time-honoured battle for dominance to play out – the old 'which cup holder is yours?' question writ very slightly larger.

The film we were there to actually see was Hayao Miyazaki's The Boy and the Heron, which – to the initiated at least – goes some way to explaining why the place was so full. Miyazaki is synonymous with Studio Ghibli, the revered Japanese animation house responsible for such classic (and regularly revived) movies as Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Grave of the Fireflies, and so on. It's fatuous and not entirely accurate to describe Ghibli as the Japanese equivalent of Disney, but hey, what do you know, I just pretty much did even without really meaning to: their films have a devoted international following and many iconic elements – most of which duly appear in The Boy and the Heron.

The boy is Mahito Mako (English voice by Luca Padovan), whom some commentators have identified as a proxy for Miyazaki himself: the film opens with the firebombing of Tokyo during the Second World War, an event in which Mahito's mother is killed (any doubts that this is a proper Studio Ghibli film should be dispelled by the fact that the opening is quite so uncompromisingly bleak). A short while later Mahito's father (Christian Bale) decides to marry his former sister-in-law (Gemma Chan) and relocate his family and business operations to the countryside – to his wife's old family estate. As you could probably have predicted, Mahito is having issues dealing with this apparent supplanting of his mother and the change of scene.

So far, so naturalistic, but soon enough things take a bit of a left turn, mainly as Mahito finds himself being stalked by the local heron in a vaguely threatening manner, the bird eventually starting to croak vague threats at him (it sounds not very much like Robert Pattinson in the English dub, but that's the name on the credits). This initially happens after Mahito cracks himself over the head with a rock in a bid for sympathy from the new household, but if the suggestion is that part of what follows is a hallucinatory expression of his personal issues, the film doesn't make a big deal about it. Eventually – for this is a carefully paced film – Mahito finds himself lured into a mysterious ruined tower on the family estate, supposedly built by his great-grand-uncle out of an old meteorite. Which is the point at which the trademark Miyazaki and Ghibli trippiness really kicks in.

The tower, it seems – I am hesitant to speak with certainty about this, because it's not a film that really benefits from a dogmatic sensibility, and not at all because the swirl of images and ideas discombobulated me so severely I nearly fell asleep – exists in multiple realities and times simultaneously, and is overseen by a mysterious figure known as the Tower Master (Mark Hamill). Exactly what's going on in there is. . . well, there's a beautiful oceanic world, where an honest and hard-working fisherwoman (Florence Pugh) feeds the spirits of the unborn with her catch, and huge flocks of pelicans try to devour the baby souls. There's also an area where an army of man-eating giant parakeets and their king (Dave Bautista) are in charge.

All very predictable, run-of-the-mill stuff, I'm sure you'll agree. It's here to facilitate a fairly dense story about loss and grief and the acceptance of responsibility, brought to the screen with Ghibli's usual astonishing technical virtuosity – all their signature bits are deployed, from the grotesquely gnomish old women, to the food preparation, the grass waving in the wind, the painstaking depiction of the natural world, and so on. Apparently there have been some changes in the Ghibli production process to accommodate Miyazaki's advancing years, but I would be lying if I said this looked like anything less than the studio at the height of its powers, aesthetically, at least.

Thematically it also looks like classic Ghibli material – it's about family bonds, the relationship between humanity and nature, and the gaining of wisdom and responsibility. However, these don't seem to me to be handled quite as deftly as on some past occasions, and this is perhaps due to some uncertainty about just what kind of story this is – fantasy, certainly, but of exactly what flavour? It's not secondary-world fantasy of the kind written by Tolkien or George RR Martin – or at least, if it is, it's a curiously poorly-developed and expressed secondary world. If it's allegorical fantasy, with every element of the fantasy domain signifying or mirroring something in the 'real world' of the film, then the metaphors involved remain curiously obscure – it'd be nice to think that Dave Bautista playing a giant regal sword-wielding parakeet tyrant was standing in for something suitably momentous and relatable in the story, but it's hard to shake the impression that all the really weird stuff is here for the fun of it, and to allow Miyazaki to indulge his love of the grotesque.

I am sure Miyazaki would not want to be indulged or to have any allowances made for the fact he has come out of retirement to make this movie, and so I must conclude that The Boy and the Heron is a bit less wholly satisfying than many films from the Ghibli back catalogue – visually it's beautifully done, and the general sense of the story is certainly there, but at the same time the vaulting strangeness of some of the fantasy elements is more of a barrier to fully enjoying the story than a contributor to it, and there is curious lack of focus – if the film is indeed about coming to terms with grief, it's hard to see how the parakeets (for example) serve to deepen or explore that theme. But even a rather mystifying Ghibli movie is still extremely watchable and not quite like anything else in world cinema.

Also Showing

Still hanging around in cinemas post-Christmas is Paul King's Wonka, a prequel to Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and its adaptations. Timothy Chalamet plays the title character as a young man just starting out as a chocolatier somewhere stylised and European, who finds himself given a hard time by the local choccie-making cartel and forced to become an indentured labourer in a horrible laundry run by Olivia Colman. And, as you might expect from the makers of Paddington, it's an amiable and visually-pleasing movie with a very good cast.

On the other hand, the undercurrent of suppressed nastiness which gives authentic Dahl its spicy flavour is missing, and rather than the enigmatic, unpredictable agent of moral judgement that (for example) Gene Wilder was playing, Chalamet presents Willy Wonka as a wholly non-threatening and earnest young man, which seems like a missed opportunity. The new songs are nice but forgettable, and Hugh Grant comes close to stealing the movie as an Oompa-Loompa. It passes the time pleasantly enough.

Enjoying the much-longer post-cinema phase of its existence is Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, streaming on the big N. It's a sequel to the 2000 Aardman film about a prison break from a chicken farm; this time, the chickens have to break into another, much more high-tech chicken nugget factory to rescue one of their number who has naively wandered in there. There was some controversy – perhaps justifiably – about the sacking of Julia Sawalha as the voice of the protagonist as 'her voice has aged', especially as the character is meant to be older and Thandiwe Newton, who's replaced her, is only a few years younger than Sawalha anyway. They've also sacked Mel Gibson, which didn't seem to bother anyone.

It's another technically brilliant animation, with some sets and sequences taking place on a breathtaking scale. But the jokes aren't that great this time, and while there are still a few movie spoofs and references – Truman Show, Stepford Wives – a lot of the British quirkiness you might be hoping for is absent, and the scale and slickness of the movie aren't really a good enough substitute. Not a bad movie by any means, but a bit bland.

Awix

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