There's little purpose in this story beyond a brief authorial self insert for Miyazaki to exposit dialogue on the woe of a creator of worlds/movies trying to pass on his torch to his successor of heredity like Goro/grandchildren. Pretty much the entire rest of the story is just nonsensical contrivances that go nowhere.
So much of the depth of tons of fairytale character references from the source book like with his mother being Snow White was almost completely dropped leaving nonsensical scatterings without a point.
Sad given this is broadly more or less just like Spirited Away being ripped-off by Deep Sea, but instead done to a horror story that was trying to subvert fairytales stories much like Alice and Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz. frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the source material, TBookoLT, drew inspiration from Spirited Away too.
It's absurdly high-budget art/animation though (which they had to license out their movies for additional funding to dig themselves out of the hole of debt they spent working on this).
Edited to conform to community standards.
