Kaze wo Mita Shounen

A wonderful shounen anti-war film which slipped through the cracks. The amazing art will surely catch your eye. The vintage styling, reminiscent of "Now and Then, Here and There", will make you think you're watching a film that's much older than a 2000 movie. The Boy Who Saw the Wind's classic look paints the film as a tribal fantasy epic, despite its technologically-advanced universe. The result is a multi-temporal environment which is nostalgic, modern, and futuristic, all at the same time. Within this universe, the common boy-saves-girl anti-war drama takes place, of which Now and Then, Laputa, Conan, and Agito are variants. The Boy Who Saw theWind makes its mark among these through its tragic plot and awesome visuals. The only pitfall of this film is the hurried direction which takes place in the second half, most likely due to time or budget constraints. The lack of build-up and anticipation at this point makes the film seem like it's jumping around, but nothing important is left out. The Boy Who Saw the Wind is worth watching, especially if you enjoyed any of the above-mentioned works.

In the trauma therapy business there's much talk about the nervous system activation. When we encounter a situation that is frightening, dangerous or emotionally painful, our nervous system activates the fight/flight response. If we are unable to resolve the situation we can go into a freeze response instead, completely shutting down either partly (such as not feeling emotions, stop feeling physical pain) or fully such as passing out. If we can resolve a dangerous situation somehow, we still need to downregulate our nervous system to "rest and digest", this takes time and focused effort. One problem in our world is a culture where we ratherkeep a high tension dysregulated nervous system (for example by chronic screen time) than taking the effort to heal. Many good movies such as the works by Miyazaki Hayao works within the parameter of nervous system activation - downregulation. Chihiro experiences something painful, then she gets help by her friends to integrate the painful event. Tension, release, tension, release. The whole Natsume Yuujinchou can be seen as a story about a boy doing downregulation from a traumatic childhood. So Kaze wo Mita Shounen is supposed to be a children's movie. From the perspective of trauma and nervous system dysregulation it is absolutely not suitable for children. The traumatic events are stacked on each other accompanied by graphic violence. The situations are never really resolved and there's never taken time for downregulation. The point isn't that children aren't capable of seeing some bad situations, but these situations needs time to be dealt with, to be resolved, just like good works for children does (or as in Naruto when a situation can't be resolved, take time to really process that). That said, there's other problems with the movie as well, such as a very chaotic second half without any clear direction, the magic the MC has isn't really explained or utilized and comes across as a bad deus ex machina, and so forth. It was an interesting premise but for a children's movie it's not really well made.

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