Whis­per of the Heart remains Stu­dio Ghibli’s most mov­ing outlier

Twen­ty five years after its release in Japan, Stu­dio Ghibli’s first the­atri­cal film not direct­ed by either of its co-founders, Hayao Miyaza­ki and Isao Taka­ha­ta, stands among its very best. Based on the 1989 man­ga of the same name by Aoi Hiira­gi, Whis­per of the Heart is every bit as soul­ful and thought­ful as the work of direc­tor Yoshi­fu­mi Kondo’s men­tors. It’s said that Kon­do would have been their suc­ces­sor, but trag­i­cal­ly the ani­ma­tor died from ill­ness in 1998.

Writ­ten for the screen by Miyaza­ki, the film observes teenage girl Shizuku (Yoko Gonna) liv­ing in Tama Hills in Tokyo. When we meet her, an unknown boy Sei­ji has tak­en out 3 of the same books as her, and her imag­i­na­tion begins to whir – what is Sei­ji like? The curios­i­ty spurs her on to look for him, and she soon finds his grand­fa­ther Shiro’s shop, and with it inspi­ra­tion to start cre­at­ing her own work.

From its open­ing, Whis­per of the Heart’s roman­tic view of the city at night already strikes a dif­fer­ent tone to pre­vi­ous Ghi­b­li films, which often con­cern man’s encroach­ment on nature’s ter­ri­to­ry. Swoon­ing cuts of blimps, pylons and oth­er evi­dence of human con­nec­tion over­take views of forests and open land­scapes, with sound­scapes of cicadas, trains and cars mixed with clas­si­cal and elec­tron­ic notes from com­pos­er Yuji Nomi (a mentee of Ryuchi Sakamato).

This all feels imme­di­ate­ly dis­tinct from every Ghi­b­li film that came before it, per­haps with the excep­tion of Isao Takahata’s Only Yes­ter­day. It could be said that’s part of why it has par­tic­u­lar favour among Ghi­b­li enthu­si­asts; it has a qui­et and human­ist inter­est in the ecosys­tem of the city, how peo­ple con­nect and move around, and how art con­nects them.

Unlike Only Yes­ter­day, how­ev­er, Kon­do focus­es on cramped urban spaces over that film’s more spa­cious mid­dle class, rur­al liv­ing. He could even be said to roman­ti­cise them, as Kon­do packs every space with the small­est, lived-in details; human habi­tats imbued with as much won­der as the more fan­tas­ti­cal Ghi­b­li films. Most impor­tant is the expres­sion of a deep appre­ci­a­tion for all kinds of cre­ativ­i­ty – whether writ­ten or played or craft­ed, all are equal­ly wor­thy and expres­sive, like the clock face in Shiro’s shop.

There’s also song. Shizuku works on trans­lat­ing John Denver’s ​‘Take Me Home, Coun­try Roads’ into Japan­ese for her class­mates to per­form. That trans­la­tion is (ini­tial­ly) the focus of much of its mus­ings about cre­ativ­i­ty, and a piv­otal part of the film’s stand­out set piece, a sin­ga­long with Sei­ji and oth­ers. The moment is an emo­tion­al turn­ing point for Shizuku, decid­ing she wants to more direct­ly share her feel­ings through artis­tic expres­sion of her own. Like Kiki or Taeko before her, Shizuku is immense­ly relat­able, wor­ried that she hasn’t got the tal­ent to cre­ate. But the film assures that there is some­thing there that she need only recog­nise and polish.

Whis­per of the Heart is about how young peo­ple make sense of the world, learn­ing to cre­ate as well as the agency they need to do so, some­thing Shizuku’s father and Seiji’s grand­fa­ther both recog­nise. It’s not even about solv­ing some­thing entire­ly, it’s sim­ply about find­ing the begin­ning of their path, less a typ­i­cal com­ing-of-age sto­ry than it is a tale of self-actualisation.

The par­tic­u­lars about Shizuku’s book aren’t impor­tant, nor the rough­ness of her prose – as Shi­ro puts it, that glimpse of an unpol­ished jew­el of tal­ent is valu­able in itself. It’s worth men­tion­ing the lit­er­al trans­la­tion of the film’s title Mimi o Sumase­ba, mean­ing ​”If you lis­ten close­ly”. Through its lov­ing detail and close atten­tion to char­ac­ter, Kon­do and Miyaza­ki deter­mine that it doesn’t mat­ter what form that tal­ent takes. As the title sug­gests, all you have to do is find it.