The Incomparable’s episode about The Boy and the Heron was a good sanity check that my own intuition was right. Yes, it’s weird and yes, most of it is just a dream, following the incoherent-but-comprehensible dream logic better than most movies. As a non-native speaker of English I did not find Christian Bale’s voice acting as off-putting as TI guests did, but I agree that he comes off as not a very nice person and even a bit of a war profiteer. How that can be any different in the Japanese version I can’t foresee, but I’ll find out soon enough.