Ryan Larson - The Shadow World

 We've discussed the shadow self-- a counterpart or complementary character that acts as a foil or guide for a hero. But in The Boy and the Heron, we see an entire shadow world-- in which every character in the story has a different counterpart. This is not the first time this trope has been used in fiction. In The Wizard of Oz, for example, it is hinted (in the movie, at least) that each of the fantastical characters Dorothy meets is a representation of someone she knows in Kansas. This might hint that the whole adventure was just a dream, but I digress. 

But the interesting thing about these shadow worlds is that the only major character without a double is usually the protagonist. The boy from The Boy and the Heron does not change physically when crossing between worlds, like the other characters such as the parakeets do. Similarly, Dorothy does not have a representation of herself in Oz. The fact that the protagonist is often unique, one could argue, leads to the conclusion that the protagonist is of some special importance to the world-- in the case of Oz, if it is true that it was all a dream, then Dorothy is not just a person in Oz, she is the reason Oz exists. 

Perhaps these shadow worlds are meant to serve as a physical representation of the character's thoughts. Dorothy, for instance, doesn't like her neighbor, and the neighbor manifests as a witch. It's been a while since I've seen the movie, but there are probably other parallels as well. The boy's mother from The Boy and the Heron has the ability to harness fire, and his mother dies in a fire in the 'real' world. Perhaps the boy envisions his mother as a master of fire because he wants to imagine that she was not killed in the fire after all, or perhaps there is just an unconscious association between the two.

This theory, like most others, doesn't hold up completely. The parakeets are the villains of The Boy and the Heron, for instance, yet the protagonist has no ill associations with parakeets in the 'real' world. Perhaps there are cultural things from Japan that make the story more sensical for native audiences, or perhaps the randomness of Ghibli movies is just part of their appeal.