In the end they find CR - he is at the skull rock for some reason - looking for them - and they walk back through the entire movie, but all the dangerous places are revealed to have all along been safe and innocuous like you would expect from the Hundred Acre Wood - the thorn maze is just a rose garden, the giant crevice is just a little ditch etc. There's a song about how scary things look when you're alone and don't believe in yourself. To this day I think that's an unmatched way of visually showing the effect of abject helplessness, in any story, let alone kid's media, which has a strange relationship with scary and dark things. I've not seen another movie that matched the real power of a child's imagination on expanding spaces and making them more impressive - like in that one minute scene of things changing from their scary forms to their friendly forms I saw the entire feeling of getting older and having all your old haunts turn really small looking, having things you used to be affected by affect you less, etc. in other words the entire cycle of human interest and experience, and how it can be depressed and turned around. I probably wrote a post akin to this already because I like the movie that much.
I kind of said before maybe human development is in reverse and kids are granpas psychologically to some extent, want their own clique of experience but instead of being intolerant to new experience it's rooted in like very real childhood fear of the unknown. Somewhere I read in the Dragon Warrior booklet that the enemies get tougher when CROSSING BRIDGES and was like trained to be fearful of bridges in the game lol. It's a good metaphor when you think about it, were like the game design choices intrinsically linked with metaphor knowingly. The final boss gives you a sort of fatal/bad ending Yes/No choice if you choose wrong, when up to that point the yes/no choices in the game were trivial. Deep shit
Edit: for how wacked out and awesome Final Fantasy lore and backstory gets, and for how masochistic the level grinding is in Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest, I think the Dragon Quest games at least the old ones get closer at like BRAVE feeling, like "whoa yes it was masochistic experience point grinding, but I'm finally here at the Rainbow Bridge...... crazyass bridge materializing theme plays, did I like /accomplish/ something or the closest equivalent in a dumb videogame?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKGiWv5uJ3s lol not as epic as I remember but still SOUNDS LIKE RAINBOWZ lol
Edit: on Wikipedia there is a nice story that supposedly Legend of Zelda was inspired by real life growing up in rural Japan, wandering the countryside (probably 'far away from home' factor was exaggerated due to childhood) but he wanders off enough to find this CAVE and it is like childhood fear of the dark and unknown rolled into one, that young Miyamoto ventures into the cave after some hesitation, and like CONFRONTS FEARZ right then and there and then whatever, it's just some cave mang. Like at the most there were gross bugs in the cave, probably not even the kind of cave that could be home to some wolf or something, the justified kind of fear
Edit: far away from home gets exaggerated in childhood, but literally just size/proportion feels exaggerated, Toys R Us kind of had the glorified warehouse/wal-mart thing going on but I literally thought the building was like 50 stories tall