メアリと魔女の花 / Meari to Majo no Hana / Mary and the Witch’s Flower

It’s entirely by design that everybody looked at publicity materials for Mary and the Witch’s Flower and thought, ‘Oh, Studio Ghibli have a new film coming out?’ It looks just like a Ghibli film. And so it should, with Arrietty and Marnie director Yonebayashi Hiromasa at the helm and a number of his collaborators from those films present and correct. It’s also drawn in the Ghibli house style of art that, let’s face it, is Miyazaki’s style as developed from the Toei Animation aesthetic – but was unambiguously adopted as a house style by all the other directors including Miyazaki’s great and sadly departed senior, Takahata. But Ghibli this is not. It seems like the great animation house has given up trying to create a new figurehead director and is winding up feature animation production. So the young man who got to direct two of the most recent Ghibli films and who seemed to be such a good fit because he was meek and malleable, has actually gone off to a new studio. Ghibli producer Nishimura Yoshiaki has founded Studio Ponoc, and despite having to start everything from scratch – including trying to procure funding – they have produced a film that is everything a Ghibli film ought to be. Call it derivative if you like, but I call it a logical progression. And it’s wonderful to know that a new generation will be continuing the lineage of the studio and just might live up to or even surpass the accomplishments of their forebears.

And for all its imitative qualities, this felt like freedom for Yonebayashi. For the third time, he’s adapting an old, somewhat quaint British novel for his animation – but this time it’s not so peaceful and introverted. This time it’s about witches, magic, cataclysmic spells and soaring magical flight. His light, deft touch in the previous two films was appreciated, but I get the feeling he enjoys a larger and more spectacular stage, while retaining a lot of the cute, small-scale feeling.

The source material, The Little Broomstick by Mary Stewart, is not a book I’ve ever come across. I don’t think it’s been in print for many years. I’ve vaguely heard of her from her books The Crystal Cave, an Arthurian work beloved of hippies, and The Moon-Spinners, which Disney made into a live-action film, but I’ve never read anything she wrote. I don’t know how closely this adaptation matches the source material, but I suspect it’s pretty close. And it’s probably a good idea to use a decades-old book as your source when you’re expecting to battle accusations of unoriginality: not only did they have to get Mary well-separated from Kiki so that this wouldn’t seem overly slavish in its Ghibli imitations, but it would be all too easy for a story about a British kid going to a school for magic and proving to be a prodigy at magic and flying brooms thanks to something her family did in the past to be called imitative of Harry Potter. Instead it might just make a wider audience realise just how derivative – or, to put it more kindly, how connected with a rich legacy of similar British works – Rowling’s books really were.

While Mary and Kiki are very little alike, there are far more connections with the Ghibli tradition here than just the fact that Mary looks like Ponyo grew up to look a bit like Arrietty. Perhaps most obvious would be the echo of Miyazaki’s passion for flight. But there’s more than that. The matriarchal figure first seen formed from a huge gush of water is very Spirited Away, while the powerful, noble, unstable and dangerous force at the end bring Mononoke-hime to mind. Mary at times gets the determination of Nausicaa or the inner strength of Sheeta. The design of the school is a little bit Howl-ish in places, while the gardens have just a hint of the world of The Cat Returns. On that note, just like in Whisper of the Heart, the cats here totally steal the show. Tib the grumpy cat was hilarious.

As with the likes of Mahoutsukai no Yome, it’s fun to see England rendered through the fanciful lens of Japanese romanticism. Once again there’s a very odd take on British food, with what looked like breaded chicken, beans, dumplings and sliced tomatoes on a plate together. But at the same time they had very clearly come to England and used photos of real Shropshire houses for their backgrounds – you could even see that they had some Celebrations ready to eat! Having only ever adapted British children’s books centred on adolescent girls, I’ll be interested to see if Yonebayashi expands from there after this. Britain has always kind of been represented as an echo in Ghibli’s works, from the adaptations of British books that had their locales stripped away or changed to Japan to the scenery based on Welsh mining villages in Laputa. But it seems like Yonebayashi actually wants to set films based on British works in Britain. And that’s very entertaining for me to see.

I’ll be following his career and the developments of Studio Ponoc with interest. I hope they make many, many classic films and soon the world will say Yonebayashi in the same way they now say Miyazaki.

思い出のマーニー/ Memories’ Marnie / When Marnie Was There

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. 

借りぐらしのアリエッティ/ Karigurashi no Arietti / The Borrower Arrietty

There are numerous ways in which The Borrower Arrietty is a departure for Ghibli, and all of them in a positive way. This is the first time since Yoshifumi Kondou’s Mimi-o Sumaseba that a film from one of the studio’s junior directors (ie not Miyazaki or Takahata) has looked as carefully, expensively or lovingly-realised as the flagship titles. It would be odd for someone who knows Ghibli well to mistake The Cat Returns or Tales from Earthsea for a film directed by Miyazaki – the backgrounds are nowhere near so well-realised, the colouring is much simpler and the tone tends to be less stately and artful. But, after years working as key animator on Miyazaki’s films (from Sen to Chihiro to Ponyo), as well as on notable non-Ghibli projects like Jin-Roh and Monster, Yonebayashi Hiromasu, better-known as Maro, is the latest Ghibli director. He may not yet have found his own unique voice, but as a starting place, the house style of Studio Ghibli is hard to better.

Arrietty sticks more closely to the plot of the original 50s Borrowers books than other recent adaptations, for example the slapstick 1997 film starring John Goodman and Jim Broadbent. Equally, there have been changes made to bring the story in line with more typical Ghibli aesthetics, the most obvious being the transition of the story from England to Japan, as well as a modernisation of sorts – to a very old-fashioned lifestyle in the present day. The boy is given the name Sho, and rather than being sent back home to the Colonies, he is to have an operation, giving a more melancholy sense of uncertainty to what will happen after the end of the film. Indeed, melancholy is the prevailing mood, and it works well.

The story is otherwise familiar: the little family unit of Borrowers live out of sight in a large household. Young Arrietty is an adventurous little girl, daughter of a skilled Borrower father and a loving, skittish mother. The Hollywood scriptwriters knew what they were doing when they rewrote Peagreen as a sibling for Arrietty: having a sibling in such an isolated family makes everything lighter and cheerier. While she has her loving parents, Arrietty is still far more lonesome as an only child, and that allows for a much more interesting dynamic with Sho, who is also isolated and bored because of his illness. Upon moving to the house to rehabilitate for a short time, he sees Arrietty, both in the garden and during the night, and so begins the central, small-scale crisis of the film: can he befriend the little Borrowers, or will they now have to move away?

When I heard Ghibli’s next film would be based on The Borrowers, I really wasn’t sure about the decision. The localisation made everything seem to chime better with the prevailing Ghibli mood, but I still had too much of the 1997 adaptation in mind, I suppose. I expected eccentricity and very English bumbling. But that not to be, and it soon becomes apparent why this was an excellent property to adapt.

Firstly, it has obvious appeal as a showcase of the animated craft. It’s a chance for the filmmakers to have some fun, from making little Sho appear huge from Arrietty’s point of view, to the wonderful detail of the background art when some location we normally imagine as tiny becomes cavernous to a borrower. It is the little sound effects made to seem on a far greater scale, and the little touches like water behaving totally differently when droplets are in relative terms the size of footballs, or postage stamps used as paintings on Borrower walls.

And secondly, it has a timeless, universal quality that fits with earlier Ghibli works like Omohide Poroporo and Totoro. Not much happens, but it is all gripping and emotionally charged. It is not about escaping exterminators or rallying miniature troopers, but about fundamentally different types of people trying to understand one another, and their being forced apart. I said before that the prevailing mood is melancholy, and this is right – there is sadness in Sho’s life, in the Borrowers’ situation, in the impossibility of a happy ending. There are moments of happiness, a great deal of sweetness, and even a moment or two of slapstick (the most obvious being a silly moment with a crow), but overall, this is a more mature, stately and elegant film than I expected, and its soft sadness really touched me. Exciting moments with homes invaded and little people put into jars are really only momentary changes of pace from a central discourse on a strange, personal relationship.

The only part I found misjudged was when Sho and Arrietty talk about how many of their respective species there are in the world. It comes from the original book, slightly altered because Spiller has been introduced (from the second book), but presumably in an effort to continue the bittersweet mood, Sho tells Arrietty her species is dying out, based really on nothing more than the fact he’s never seen any other Borrowers – whose culture largely revolves around staying hidden. It just seems presumptuous and downright rude, which clearly isn’t how it’s intended.

This is in every way a Ghibli film. It doesn’t have Miyazaki hallmarks like pigs or collapsing architecture or thrilling flight scenes (though Spiller at one point glides like a ninja), but I didn’t say it was a Miyazaki film: it has Ghibli’s aesthetic, whimsy, mood and likeability. And Miyazaki-style character design. Spiller even looks like a stocky grown-up Mei.

The upcoming television adaptation with Christopher Eccleston and Stephen Fry may prove to be the most faithful version yet, but I have an inkling that this will endure as my preferred interpretation. Ghibli’s next film is From Kokuriko Hill, Gorou’s second stab at being a worthy successor to o-tou-san, hopefully this time without the whiny blogging. Then come Takahata’s nursery tale and Miyazaki’s very first sequel. On the back of how much I enjoyed Arrietty, I shall probably start watching them as soon as possible again, rather than a year after release.