I’ve
been slipping lately as a Ghibli completest. There are a few movies I haven’t
gotten around to seeing in the last few years, and one of them was this, When Marnie Was There – the second movie
from Yonebashi ‘Maro’ Hiromasa, who seems to be carving out a niche for himself
adapting whimsical, gentle-paced English children’s books from a generation
ago. With Arrietty and this movie, I
thought that was simply what he was instructed to do by Miyazaki, given that those
books are on his favourites list, but since Yonebashi and various others from
Ghibli have fractured off to found Studio Ponoc, he seems to be continuing the
trend even outside Miyazaki’s influence with Mary and the Witch’s Flower.
Yes,
When Marnie Was There is an
adaptation of a 1967 novel by Joan G. Robinson set in Norfolk. Honestly, though
it won some awards and was previously adapted for Jackanory, I’d never heard of it and it seems to have been out of
print until interest was revived by this adaptation. The sample chapters I’ve
read show a rather unlikeable protagonist and lots of patronising and overdone
renderings of the Norfolk dialect, but presumably the protagonist gets more
likeable and the story itself is a sweet and well-crafted one.
This
adaptation, transplanted to Hokkaido and its comfortable-looking temperate
summers (definitely considering spending a lot of time there next year), is
remarkably well-done and tasteful. It doesn’t have the bombast of Miyazaki’s
most prominent films and won’t make anything like their cultural impact, but it’s
a wistful and sweet story in the vein of Omoide Poroporo and thus makes it into my top five Ghibli films. Yonebashi seems
to have managed to capture that middle ground between the supernatural
fantasies of Miyazaki and the everyday dramas of Takahata, and the film
benefits greatly from that.
Twelve-year-old
Anna doesn’t fit in. She’s adopted and feels distant from her family, doesn’t
make friends easily, sometimes says very rude things when she feels cornered,
and as a girl apparently with some foreign blood – visible mostly in her eye colour-
feels like an outsider in her native land. She’s also asthmatic, and the doctor
thinks the air of the Hokkaido countryside will do her good, so she goes to
stay with relatives by the sea.
In
the new town, she’s drawn to a strange mansion down on the marshes. She meets a
girl called Marnie who is free-spirited, looks like a French doll and is virtually
held as a captive in her own home by her household staff. Anna and Marnie become fast friends, to the
point they profess their love for one another and it borders on the adorably
homoerotic. Anna is in some ways girlish but with her short hair, usual choice
of shorts and rather headstrong attitude has very appealing androgynous
characteristics. Marnie is more classically girlish, usually wearing pretty
dresses and loving to dance and twirl, but also gets down to some serious
rowing when she needs to. They’re lovely characters, suit one another very well
and their intimate friendship is a joy to see unfolding, even after the twists
are revealed and we come to understand everything.
The
film is understated and beautifully-done. Movements and expressions are
rendered in a lovely way and the setting is striking, even if but for a
windmill changed for a grain silo, this could very easily have still been
Norfolk. With a Japanese matsuri. The two lead characters reminded me strangely
of Shinku and Souseiseki from Rozen Maiden, which was sweet.
I
think this will mature not as one of Ghibli’s most iconic films, but one of
their more mature and understated. Certainly one I’ll enjoy rewatching in the
future.
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