A love story, a coming-of-age tale & a deep journey into one's own past, When Marnie Was There may or may not benefit from multiple viewings but for now, it has to settle for an underwhelming experience in my book.
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On an overall scale, When Marnie Was There isn't as magical as Studio Ghibli's finest films but its take on friendship & isolation nonetheless manages to cast a spell of its own in bits n pieces which makes its story captivating for a while. Marnie herself exhibits an aura of mystery around her that not only allures Anna but us viewers as well. The film can be viewed as a coming-of-age drama that follows the journey of Anna from a lonely & anxious girl at the beginning of the film to a more confident person later in the story. However, it's the beautiful relationship between Anna & Marnie that leaves the biggest mark. The Japanese voice cast is only as fitting as the studio's previous works. The two girls instantly form a unique connection and friendship that blurs the lines between fantasy and reality. Also, the background score brims with tracks that infuse a soothing feel into the narrative. When shy, artistic Anna moves to the seaside to live with her aunt and uncle, she stumbles upon an old mansion surrounded by marshes, and the mysterious young girl, Marnie, who lives there. However, there isn't any issue with the pacing for its 103 minutes of runtime never becomes tedious at any given moment. Editing tries to juggle various elements of story at once & doesn't always succeed. The technical aspects are expertly carried out for each frame of it is sumptuously animated & vividly photographed from start to finish. And although his latest is no doubt an ambitious work, its pay-off won't be rewarding enough emotionally unless the viewers try to connect the dots all by themselves by doing a little digging of their own. Nicely directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, When Marnie Was There is his sophomore effort following his debut feature, The Secret World of Arrietty, which remains my favourite Studio Ghibli film to be not directed by Miyazaki. As their new relationship blossoms over the next few days & both get to know each other better, it is unraveled that Anna is more closely related to Marnie than expected. Based on the novel of the same name, When Marnie Was There follows Anna a 12-year old girl who takes a trip to a countryside town for health reasons and discovers an abandoned mansion where she finds an unlikely friend in Marnie a blond girl. THE VERDICT: A gentle tale, tinged with melancholy told with all the loving attention to detail you expect from Studio Ghibli.The last film to be produced under the Studio Ghibli banner before the acclaimed animation studio decided to take a break from filmmaking following the retirement of Hayao Miyazaki, When Marnie Was There is an elegantly crafted & gorgeously animated tale that intertwines dreams with reality as well as past with present, only to end up getting entangled in its own web. Yonebayashi’s film may not give us Ghibli at the height of its powers, but there’s an emotional depth and maturity to it that leaves most conventional animation work looking trivial by comparison. Anna’s journey to self-discovery and acceptance, as she gradually discovers what it is that links her to Marnie, is traced with sympathy but shuns sentimentality. Wind on water, a train seen from way overhead snaking through the countryside – there are vivid, tactile details to dwell on in every frame.
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But for all her lack of self-confidence, there’s a resilience to Anna that tells us she’ll come through she’s a Ghibli heroine, after all, and the studio’s at its best with spunky female characters.Īs ever with Ghibli, the glowing immediacy of the images is what enchants. The mood, for the most part gently wistful, now and then turns darker: a storm sequence in a ruined silo even gets scary. Is she a ghost? A time traveller? Or an imaginary companion dreamt up by a lonely girl? They become friends – but Marnie keeps mysteriously vanishing. There, in a seemingly derelict marshland mansion, she meets a girl dressed in old-fashioned clothes called Marnie (Kasumi Arimura/Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka).
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Worried about her health and her depressed state of mind, Anna’s foster mother sends her off to stay with relatives in a coastal village. “In this world,” she muses, “there’s an invisible magic circle. Voiced by Sara Takatsuki in the subtitled version and Hailee Steinfeld in the English dub, Anna’s a shy 12-year-old who suffers from asthma and is convinced – partly because she’s an orphan, living with foster parents – that she doesn’t belong. Like Yonebayashi’s previous film Arrietty (based on Mary Norton’s classic The Borrowers), it’s adapted from an English young-adult novel – in this case by Joan G.
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Even so, it’s a warm, highly appealing film, full of quiet grace, and executed with all the unforced charm and painstaking visual subtlety we expect from Ghibli.