When Marnie Was There | Little White Lies

When Marnie Was There

07 Jun 2016 / Released: 10 Jun 2016

A traditional Japanese house with blue-framed windows, surrounded by lush greenery and a stone wall. A child stands in the foreground, facing the house.
A traditional Japanese house with blue-framed windows, surrounded by lush greenery and a stone wall. A child stands in the foreground, facing the house.
4

Anticipation.

Studio Ghibli’s final film, from the director behind the very lovely Arrietty.

3

Enjoyment.

At times as awkward as its young protagonist, yet brimming with the familiar Ghibli magic.

4

In Retrospect.

Not so much an ending, as a new beginning.

A mag­i­cal com­ing-of-age sto­ry by one of Stu­dio Ghibli’s most tal­ent­ed filmmakers.

Talk about a tough act to fol­low. Trail­ing behind the dual release of Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Ris­es and Isao Takahata’s The Tale of the Princess Kaguya by less than a year, When Marnie Was There is tasked with turn­ing off the lights and low­er­ing the shut­ters at Japan­ese ani­ma­tion pow­er­house Stu­dio Ghi­b­li. Its two pre­de­ces­sors were mono­lith­ic state­ments from old mas­ters, both intent on break­ing ground in the art­form they helped define. Togeth­er, they felt like a con­clu­sion, an appro­pri­ate point to put fea­ture film pro­duc­tion on indef­i­nite hia­tus. Yet here is direc­tor Hiro­masa Yonebayashi, pick­ing up the mic dropped by his elders to tell one last tale.

The result is a fan­ta­sy-tinged com­ing-of-age melo­dra­ma adapt­ed from a 1967 nov­el by British children’s author Joan G Robin­son. It recounts a sum­mer friend­ship between Anna (asth­mat­ic, social­ly awk­ward) and a mys­te­ri­ous girl she spies hang­ing around an aban­doned water­front man­sion. Dis­tinct from the studio’s fan­tas­ti­cal adven­tures, When Marnie Was There fits into one of the company’s sec­ondary genre moulds: the teen feels’ dra­ma, as best seen in Whis­per of the Heart and From Up on Pop­py Hill, both of which were writ­ten by Miyaza­ki as projects for protégé directors.

Yonebayashi adapts Robinson’s nov­el him­self, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Ghi­b­li vet­er­ans Keiko Niwa (co-writer of Arri­et­ty) and Masashi Ando (an ani­ma­tor with cred­its dat­ing back to 1991’s Only Yes­ter­day). Where Miyaza­ki found a grace­ful nar­ra­tive flow to com­ple­ment his char­ac­ters’ grow­ing pains, When Marnie Was There is volatile and unpre­dictable from the off: a pleas­ant pre-titles sequence in a sum­mery school­yard is upturned when Anna suf­fers an anx­i­ety attack after an every­day social inter­ac­tion goes awry. She twists her­self into ago­nised emo­tion­al knots.

The angst keeps com­ing, as Yonebayashi stacks melo­dra­mat­ic themes on top of an oth­er­wise feath­erlight times­lip plot, encom­pass­ing state sub­si­dies for fos­ter fam­i­lies, bur­geon­ing sex­u­al­i­ty, domes­tic vio­lence, men­tal ill­ness and, most remark­ably, mixed-race iden­ti­ty in Japan. It’s a far cry from Miyazaki’s metic­u­lous­ly con­trolled, high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed sto­ry­telling, but there’s no deny­ing the rad­i­cal ambi­tion inher­ent in tack­ling top­ics as yet unseen in the Ghi­b­li canon.

Still, it often feels like Yonebayashi’s attempt to decode the Studio’s DNA, using Robinson’s sto­ry to illu­mi­nate Miyazaki’s cre­ative rela­tion­ship with nos­tal­gia, pas­toral set­tings and Euro­pean influ­ences. As Anna, suf­fo­cat­ed by social pres­sures, boards a train to the coast, she is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly rein­vig­o­rat­ed by the sea­side air, and drawn out of her shell by Marnie, the enig­mat­ic girl-out-of-time, whose globe trot­ting fam­i­ly bring glam­our to Hokkai­do, with Jazz Age gath­er­ings that recall the world of The Wind Rises.

While it may not be a con­sum­mate suc­cess – Totoro-ador­ing young­sters will find the slow pace tough; world cin­e­ma afi­ciona­dos may feel under­nour­ished by the blunt sim­plic­i­ties of its social dra­ma – this is a strong entry in the Post-Ghi­b­li’ ani­mé sub-genre. Anna and Yonebayashi look back for mean­ing – to the past, to the coun­try, to sim­pler plea­sures such as boat­ing and let­ter writ­ing – as if it were only through an accep­tance of his­to­ry, and an under­stand­ing of our fore­bears, that we can flourish.

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