Reviews

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 rather keep 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.