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This is a beautifully told film with a consistent mood of both hope and melancholy. My only critique is that it tries to tell and be too many things at once. It goes from being a tale about single motherhood, to growing up, to finding one’s own path, to accepting change and letting go. That’s not to say a story can’t include all these things at once, especially since the mentioned themes all complement each other and go together, but in this story in particular, with its languid atmosphere and setting, I feel like it would have been better if we could have taken our time with each theme. It would have made an already impactful story that much more memorable. The abundance of themes also affects the pacing, which is mostly slow, but then rapidly speeds up at certain times to mark the passing of years, years I wish we could have witnessed more of. It gives the movie a sense of temporal disjointedness. It also confuses me from which perspective to view the story. At the start it is very clearly the mother's, though it is narrated by Yuki. This shifts as we go through the film, and more emphasis is placed on the children. Because these two perspectives are included, I feel like neither is given enough room to really shine.
At the heart of it all, it’s still an effectively made movie about humanity and the passage of time, but it could have benefited from having more time to breathe, settle, and develop. I wouldn’t have minded watching a first movie about the trials of raising wolf children and a second movie about them growing up and finding their own paths.
Or maybe the point is to leave us with exactly this--a feeling of wanting more, a feeling of "not enough" and "too fast," just like the mother in the story. Maybe. I'll have to watch it again with this in mind to see if my opinion changes.
