Hiro­masa Yonebayashi: ​‘The his­to­ry of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li is also a his­to­ry of myself’

Hiro­masa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There is a study of teenage grief and anx­i­ety that’s leav­ened by Stu­dio Ghibli’s typ­i­cal recourse to gen­tle whim­sy and fan­ta­sy. The direc­tor talks to us about fol­low­ing up Arri­et­ty, his 2010 take on ​‘The Bor­row­ers’, work­ing with the great Hayao Miyaza­ki, and the val­ue of close atten­tion to detail.

LWLies: How do you see When Marnie Was There as relat­ing to your pre­vi­ous film Arrietty?

Yonebayashi: With Arri­et­ty, because Miyaza­ki cre­at­ed the con­cept on the screen­play, I was always con­scious of Miyaza­ki and how he would feel, how he would receive it. But with Marnie, what I was con­scious of was pure­ly the enjoy­ment of the audi­ence. At the end of Arri­et­ty, the bor­row­ers leave their nest and they fly away. So for the sec­ond one, this time I thought I should be able to do it on my own.

It seems like a big deci­sion to make an ani­mat­ed film that tack­les sub­jects such as grief and depression.

It was very dif­fi­cult when I read the orig­i­nal nov­el, ​‘Marnie’, by Joan G Robin­son, there was so much detailed expres­sion of Anna and Marnie. A visu­al­i­sa­tion of those words would be very dif­fi­cult. But at the same time I thought that if I could suc­ceed, it would be a very rare type of film. Anna builds a wall around her, she refus­es help from the out­side, but at the same time she’s scream­ing out for it as well, and even­tu­al­ly she realis­es she’s loved by the peo­ple around her and she’s grad­u­al­ly adapt­ing to the real­i­ties of life.

There are lot of ref­er­ences to Alfred Hitch­cock in the film – from Ver­ti­go to The Birds and Marnie.

I wasn’t par­tic­u­lar con­scious of this, but prob­a­bly there is an ele­ment of sus­pense. It begins with the meet­ing of Marnie and Anna, but grad­u­al­ly we won­der who Marnie actu­al­ly is. Ref­er­enc­ing oth­er movies is actu­al­ly quite rare for Stu­dio Ghi­b­li – we haven’t done it before. I think there is a psy­cho­log­i­cal link to Hitch­cock, and that’s why you might have felt that sim­i­lar­i­ty. But it wasn’t intentional.

How much real pho­tog­ra­phy and real film of land­scapes and objects are incor­po­rat­ed into the ani­ma­tion process?

I think it depends on the film, but with this one espe­cial­ly, the real world need­ed to be rep­re­sent­ed as real. Marnie exists in a fan­ta­sy and her world is ide­al­is­tic. And when Marnie is not around, Anna’s world has to be very real­is­tic. Our pro­duc­tion design­er, Yohei Tane­da, has lots of expe­ri­ence in live action films, so I asked him how to achieve that effect. We went to Hokkai­do and took a lot of ref­er­ences of land­scape, scenery and architecture.

There is a sequence where Anna gets on a train at the begin­ning of the film – there is so much detail in how the door clos­es and the sounds that the trains makes. How long does a sequence like that take to animate?

There are so many staff work­ing simul­ta­ne­ous­ly on that sin­gle moment, but it still took sev­er­al months. Oth­er com­pa­nies would prob­a­bly do it with CG, but we hand draw every­thing. What we expect ani­ma­tors to do is to embed them­selves in a moment and recre­ate what they see. So yes, if you felt that scene was remark­able, that makes me very happy.

Films like this and Arri­et­ty are almost like live-action movies ren­dered as animation.

I am very hap­py you notice and feel that way. For instance, when Anna places her feet in the marsh water for the first time, you feel that it’s cold. It is very dif­fi­cult for hand drawn ani­ma­tion to depict or express that sen­sa­tion, but it is those sort of a details are nec­es­sary for this type of film to work.

What was the first Ghi­b­li film you ever saw and do you recall your instant reac­tion to it?

It’s maybe not strict­ly speak­ing a Ghi­b­li film, but Nau­si­caä, of the Val­ley of the Wind, and then My Neigh­bour Totoro. I’ve been watch­ing all of them since I was a child. I was excit­ed by the world of Nau­si­caä, and then even­tu­al­ly I joined the Ghi­b­li team and I was build­ing one of these worlds for them. That was a won­der. The his­to­ry of Stu­dio Ghi­b­li is also a his­to­ry of myself, from child­hood to this very moment.