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When Marnie Was There is realistically the last film that Studio Ghibli will ever put out. Studio Ghibli is by far the most famous foreign film studio in any era or region, led by the only foreign director that a decent amount of Americans could call by (last) name, Hayao Miyazaki, so well known that Microsoft accepts it as a word and doesn’t ask me to correct the spelling of it. Miyazaki and his good friend and fellow anime legend Isao Takahata came together to create their own animation studio in 1985. The name, translating into English as “New Wind”, was supposed to “blow a new wind through the anime industry”. Takahata and especially Miyazaki hated the state of the anime industry. It was, and to be harsh but honest still is, a perverse, violent, sexist fad based entirely on cash cow franchises appealing to the lowest common denominator. The anime world revolved around TV series, most of those being adapted from already popular manga, with feature length pictures being tie-ins to the series. Miyazaki’s own first film, Castle of Cagliostro, is the second movie of a series based on Lupin The Third, adapted from a 155 episode television series, adapted from a 27 episode television series, adapted from a 14 volume manga. Originality in anime was dead, and Ghibli was there to fix it, with never before seen themes like pacifism, environmentalism, and escapism, innovative takes on European novels never before heard of in Japan, and a much needed respect for female characters, who were often the protagonists of their stories. This was all fine and dandy, but Miyazaki wasn’t stupid. He knew that he needed to build a stable of world class anime directors to take the place of him and Takahata once they retired from filmmaking, in some far off date that must be 20 years into the future. That stable started with Yoshifumi Kondo, who directed one of Ghibli’s best films in the 1995 gem Whisper of the Heart. Kondo died in 1998 of a stress-induced heart attack, a tragedy that drastically changed the course of the company forever. If Kondo’s health issues weren’t issues, Studio Ghibli would be even more revered than they already are and they would be continuing for another decade at least. What followed Kondo’s death was the ruining of Studio Ghibli, and although they’ve held on for the last 17 years, that crippling event still haunts them and is the direct reason for their shuttering. Miyazaki spent the time after Kondo’s death creating a masterpiece about growing up and remembering roots, a couple of western sellouts to keep the profits alive, and a self-insert swan song. Takahata finished by far his weakest film out of obligation, took a decade off, and then made a swan song of his own. Those 17 years also saw the half-hearted efforts to jumpstart the careers of a few new directors, notably Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the director of this.
Yonebayashi really got screwed by circumstances, because as decades of television have proved, the best finales are the known ones. A finale is satisfying when the people working on it go in knowing that they want this to be the final impression of them and make it feel like a goodbye. The least satisfying ones are the ones that are just another episode that get called a finale because the network cancelled them midseason. No matter how good or bad this or any other Ghibli movie is, The Wind Rises and to a lesser extent Princess Kaguya were finales, and When Marnie Was There is just another episode. Wind saw Miyazaki give his career a definitive ending. He made a movie essentially about himself, touching on all of his most used topics over the years and reflecting on how his art has influenced others. On a literal and basic level, the story showed how much Miyazaki has matured over the decades, ending on a somber note and going into history, the one place his childlike mind and love of fantasy elements would never let him touch before. Kaguya kind of did the same for Takahata. It’s not as personal and the impact is blunted because Takahata was always the one that dealt with more serious issues, but it still saw the director give us his most somber film and especially ending yet, and the story about growing up and animation style showed a level of maturity not yet seen in him. Yonebayashi adapted a British book into a movie about a teenage girl who goes through some struggles but end up happily, intertwined with fantastical elements and conventional visuals. It doesn’t have a deeper sense of finality or maturity like the two most recent Ghibli works, and instead should be compared to Kiki’s Delivery Service or Whisper of the Heart. The second comparison gives off a sense of depressing irony, that what once was a beautiful and wonderful beginning has become a mediocre ending, not because the film itself got any worse but because the world around it changed so much that it can’t be seen in the same way. I don’t think I will ever see a movie in a worse situation, where the context makes me enjoy a great film less.
When Marnie Was There:
Is this film really great? Aspects are very good. In very un-Ghibli-like fashion the animation was not one of them. There were a few times where the animators just seemed to clock out. After a party, the two main characters have a dance. This should have been a really impactful moment, but Marnie’s face stays static. Her expression never changes, her body just sways. It’s almost creepy, and I have come to expect more from this production company. For every really beautiful or picturesque frame of midnight rowing, there is a lazy frame where the faces or backgrounds lack depth. The attention to detail is below par, but maybe I would be more accepting if the Ghibli name wasn’t attached.
The story is a weird one. Our main character, in typical Ghibli style, is a teenage girl moving to a new place. There isn’t much of a plot, but rather a character who just kind of lives their life. In a unique for anything style, Anna is depressed. A socially anxious and self-loathing level of depression. She’s actually kind of insufferable in that way. I knew that kid and at times was that kid. Everybody hates that kid. They drag everybody down by causing everybody around them to be depressed. Her depression is healed after meeting Marnie, a blonde girl who exists in some entity. To what extent is part of the supernatural mystery, in a 6th Sense kind of way.
Anna becomes happy through nothing but meeting Marnie. To what extent Marnie has an effect on her is worth dissecting further, and I don’t have a factual answer, but my interpretation was that Anna is a lesbian and finally feels like she belongs because she found a lover. It makes enough sense. Anna participates in a struggle that a lot of gay adolescents go through, namely having romantic feelings for a person that couldn’t possibly reciprocate them. Anna is jealous when Marnie dances with a boy and writes about one in her diary. She becomes dependent on Marnie to keep her going every day, and the depression seeps back when they are separated, even though Marnie seems just fine to talk to Anna like a casual friend. It also makes sense that there is no bigger relationship, because this film is more about finding the identity of an individual than relationships with others. Anna spend the first act doing nothing but alienate others, in spite of their good intentions, which further makes her kind of unlikable. She becomes more accepting of the people and world around her after learning from Marnie, even after she becomes less accepting of Marnie herself. I think this is a very powerful story in that way. Something that teenagers of any sexuality need to keep in mind is that their romantic relationships do not and will not ever define them. They can be helpful to find your place in the world, but they are always replaceable. They’re just a vehicle to help you. It’s definitely encouraging for gay and lesbian people. It doesn’t actually matter that Marnie never sends those feelings back to Anna, because she still gave her the confidence that someone else in the future could.
The mystery aspect is not as thoroughly explained as it should be. There are two questions about Marnie. We want to know who/what she is and where she comes from. The first question is answered in a Shyamalan-like twist, which can be predicted pretty easily at the 80 minute mark in this 100 minute movie, and the second question is never answered, even though the answer to the first makes having an answer for the second even more necessary. It’s a weird plot development to be sure. I think that it takes away from the film as a whole. It is simultaneously too complex and too simple. The lack of a cohesive answer makes the growth of Anna’s character feels cheapened. At the same time, this is a girl with serious mental health problems, and every single one of them gets a tidy ending where she overcomes them. She starts the movie broken, gets a friend, and end it perfectly. If the whole point of the film is about discovering the identity and development of this tortured character over one summer, we should watch her go through these things. In literally any kind of media this bothers me, from film to books to Drake music. “I started like this, and now I’m like this, but I’m not going to say how that happened” is the laziest form of writing a character change, and boy did the writing here sure feel lazy. The individual scenes and conversations worked, but didn’t add up to anything bigger. The quality of Ghibli movies not directed by one of the top two is apparently dependent on how much of the script Hayao Miyazaki pens. He wrote all of Whispers of the Heart, is one of two credited writers for the fine Arriety and Up on Poppy Hill, and had no involvement on the two worst movies Ghibli has churned out, The Cat Returns and Tales From Earthsea. He is a genius that understands how to balance character, story, and raw emotion in a way that very few people can. It has unfortunately become apparent that nobody left in Ghibli is in that crew of very few.
The one thing that the script really did get right was the cyclical structure of life. Marnie and Anna both have major issues with their parents, and there’s another woman with an estranged parental relationship that pops up later on. I can see why this story is such a huge hit with women, because it’s really made for them. Family means more as a concept to women, who are often the nurturers of children. Being a mother and being a daughter are both important parts of their identity, which ties in nicely to Anna’s quest to find an identity without being a daughter. The twist fires off an emotional gut punch here, and I was really moved by it. It’s depressing to think of these people growing up without a motherly figure, and then having to pass that bitterness onto their daughter until an even worse tragedy prevents anything else from happening. Making me feel a wide range of emotions is what the best Ghibli movies do, and in spite of how annoying Anna can be sometimes, I was happy when she found herself and sad when she was forced to do it alone. That's a success.
I watched this film in Japanese, and the voice acting was really good all around. From everything I've read the English dub script is both the exact same as the subtitled script and a very literal translation. Between that and nothing in here being especially Japanese (It's a European book about a girl that could be from anywhere and an obviously European girl), this should make the sub vs dub battle a non-issue. I would assume that both are fine.
Composing legend Joe Hisaishi sits out scoring this movie, and to give props to the music team that might actually be for the better. Hisaishi’s scores usually carry whimsy, even in situations where it might not be appropriate, and every scene of this movie is too sad to have a score like that. This score is quiet and subtle. It mostly lays off in order to let the sound effects work, and the sound effects definitely work. The mixing is great and it makes for a lovely sounding nature CD. This is also the first Ghibli movie to ever have a theme song. This could have gone wrong so easily, but the result is Fine On The Outside, a song that indie artist Priscilla Ahn has been holding onto for a decade and sent in for this film. I don’t think I could hope to describe how beautiful this song is, except for saying that it gave me more of an emotional reaction than anything in the movie. It’s every bit as magical as Spirited Away, and it puts tears in my eyes to type those words because it’s really about the nostalgia of doing something that I did often as a kid, not interact with others so I could watch Spirited Away. My childhood might not have been the greatest, but Studio Ghibli made it good. It showed me, and I would like to think the world, the power of wonder and imagination in an adult way, all while teaching kids deeper and more valuable life lessons than standard fare, like how being on the opposing side in a conflict doesn’t make someone else's cause worth less, or how even though the environment should be treated as sacred, destruction of it is an extremely necessary evil.
The song stands for more than just an exact parallel of Anna’s story. It stands for the Studio as a whole. It’s about growing up, which Ghibli has done. It’s about watching beauty, which Ghibli has let us do. It’s about going through rough times and acting like nothing is wrong, which is what this movie is for Ghibli. In some ways, it is good that this is the end. Obviously it’s terrible because we will never get the joy of watching a new Ghibli movie, and because to be brutally honest their goal of sending a new wind to shake anime to its core and change the way it was made forever didn’t really get accomplished. But When Marnie Was There is a moderate rough patch for Ghibli, and it’s going out on top before it can get to a really rough patch. This is a sad review, because it’s about a sad movie from a sad place, but it’s still a million times better than Minions or Home or Hotel Transylvania 35. Ghibli can say they’ve never released a movie as bad as some of the worst from Disney’s dark eras. They accepted that 2D animation was past their prime, they accepted that most of their top talent was long gone, and they released a good movie like nothing was wrong. The song, like the studio and especially like Miyazaki, talks frequently about witnessing beauty. It would be a crime to do anything to it, but it would be even worse to take it for granted instead of falling in love with the whimsy of fantasy worlds and the nature of the real one while we escape from the misery of feeling alone in the human created world. I will cry if you die, and I will remember the face of Studio Ghibli. Otsukaresama deshitte, genki de.
When Marnie Was There is realistically the last film that Studio Ghibli will ever put out. Studio Ghibli is by far the most famous foreign film studio in any era or region, led by the only foreign director that a decent amount of Americans could call by (last) name, Hayao Miyazaki, so well known that Microsoft accepts it as a word and doesn’t ask me to correct the spelling of it. Miyazaki and his good friend and fellow anime legend Isao Takahata came together to create their own animation studio in 1985. The name, translating into English as “New Wind”, was supposed to “blow a new wind through the anime industry”. Takahata and especially Miyazaki hated the state of the anime industry. It was, and to be harsh but honest still is, a perverse, violent, sexist fad based entirely on cash cow franchises appealing to the lowest common denominator. The anime world revolved around TV series, most of those being adapted from already popular manga, with feature length pictures being tie-ins to the series. Miyazaki’s own first film, Castle of Cagliostro, is the second movie of a series based on Lupin The Third, adapted from a 155 episode television series, adapted from a 27 episode television series, adapted from a 14 volume manga. Originality in anime was dead, and Ghibli was there to fix it, with never before seen themes like pacifism, environmentalism, and escapism, innovative takes on European novels never before heard of in Japan, and a much needed respect for female characters, who were often the protagonists of their stories. This was all fine and dandy, but Miyazaki wasn’t stupid. He knew that he needed to build a stable of world class anime directors to take the place of him and Takahata once they retired from filmmaking, in some far off date that must be 20 years into the future. That stable started with Yoshifumi Kondo, who directed one of Ghibli’s best films in the 1995 gem Whisper of the Heart. Kondo died in 1998 of a stress-induced heart attack, a tragedy that drastically changed the course of the company forever. If Kondo’s health issues weren’t issues, Studio Ghibli would be even more revered than they already are and they would be continuing for another decade at least. What followed Kondo’s death was the ruining of Studio Ghibli, and although they’ve held on for the last 17 years, that crippling event still haunts them and is the direct reason for their shuttering. Miyazaki spent the time after Kondo’s death creating a masterpiece about growing up and remembering roots, a couple of western sellouts to keep the profits alive, and a self-insert swan song. Takahata finished by far his weakest film out of obligation, took a decade off, and then made a swan song of his own. Those 17 years also saw the half-hearted efforts to jumpstart the careers of a few new directors, notably Hiromasa Yonebayashi, the director of this.
Yonebayashi really got screwed by circumstances, because as decades of television have proved, the best finales are the known ones. A finale is satisfying when the people working on it go in knowing that they want this to be the final impression of them and make it feel like a goodbye. The least satisfying ones are the ones that are just another episode that get called a finale because the network cancelled them midseason. No matter how good or bad this or any other Ghibli movie is, The Wind Rises and to a lesser extent Princess Kaguya were finales, and When Marnie Was There is just another episode. Wind saw Miyazaki give his career a definitive ending. He made a movie essentially about himself, touching on all of his most used topics over the years and reflecting on how his art has influenced others. On a literal and basic level, the story showed how much Miyazaki has matured over the decades, ending on a somber note and going into history, the one place his childlike mind and love of fantasy elements would never let him touch before. Kaguya kind of did the same for Takahata. It’s not as personal and the impact is blunted because Takahata was always the one that dealt with more serious issues, but it still saw the director give us his most somber film and especially ending yet, and the story about growing up and animation style showed a level of maturity not yet seen in him. Yonebayashi adapted a British book into a movie about a teenage girl who goes through some struggles but end up happily, intertwined with fantastical elements and conventional visuals. It doesn’t have a deeper sense of finality or maturity like the two most recent Ghibli works, and instead should be compared to Kiki’s Delivery Service or Whisper of the Heart. The second comparison gives off a sense of depressing irony, that what once was a beautiful and wonderful beginning has become a mediocre ending, not because the film itself got any worse but because the world around it changed so much that it can’t be seen in the same way. I don’t think I will ever see a movie in a worse situation, where the context makes me enjoy a great film less.
When Marnie Was There:
The story is a weird one. Our main character, in typical Ghibli style, is a teenage girl moving to a new place. There isn’t much of a plot, but rather a character who just kind of lives their life. In a unique for anything style, Anna is depressed. A socially anxious and self-loathing level of depression. She’s actually kind of insufferable in that way. I knew that kid and at times was that kid. Everybody hates that kid. They drag everybody down by causing everybody around them to be depressed. Her depression is healed after meeting Marnie, a blonde girl who exists in some entity. To what extent is part of the supernatural mystery, in a 6th Sense kind of way.
Anna becomes happy through nothing but meeting Marnie. To what extent Marnie has an effect on her is worth dissecting further, and I don’t have a factual answer, but my interpretation was that Anna is a lesbian and finally feels like she belongs because she found a lover. It makes enough sense. Anna participates in a struggle that a lot of gay adolescents go through, namely having romantic feelings for a person that couldn’t possibly reciprocate them. Anna is jealous when Marnie dances with a boy and writes about one in her diary. She becomes dependent on Marnie to keep her going every day, and the depression seeps back when they are separated, even though Marnie seems just fine to talk to Anna like a casual friend. It also makes sense that there is no bigger relationship, because this film is more about finding the identity of an individual than relationships with others. Anna spend the first act doing nothing but alienate others, in spite of their good intentions, which further makes her kind of unlikable. She becomes more accepting of the people and world around her after learning from Marnie, even after she becomes less accepting of Marnie herself. I think this is a very powerful story in that way. Something that teenagers of any sexuality need to keep in mind is that their romantic relationships do not and will not ever define them. They can be helpful to find your place in the world, but they are always replaceable. They’re just a vehicle to help you. It’s definitely encouraging for gay and lesbian people. It doesn’t actually matter that Marnie never sends those feelings back to Anna, because she still gave her the confidence that someone else in the future could.
The mystery aspect is not as thoroughly explained as it should be. There are two questions about Marnie. We want to know who/what she is and where she comes from. The first question is answered in a Shyamalan-like twist, which can be predicted pretty easily at the 80 minute mark in this 100 minute movie, and the second question is never answered, even though the answer to the first makes having an answer for the second even more necessary. It’s a weird plot development to be sure. I think that it takes away from the film as a whole. It is simultaneously too complex and too simple. The lack of a cohesive answer makes the growth of Anna’s character feels cheapened. At the same time, this is a girl with serious mental health problems, and every single one of them gets a tidy ending where she overcomes them. She starts the movie broken, gets a friend, and end it perfectly. If the whole point of the film is about discovering the identity and development of this tortured character over one summer, we should watch her go through these things. In literally any kind of media this bothers me, from film to books to Drake music. “I started like this, and now I’m like this, but I’m not going to say how that happened” is the laziest form of writing a character change, and boy did the writing here sure feel lazy. The individual scenes and conversations worked, but didn’t add up to anything bigger. The quality of Ghibli movies not directed by one of the top two is apparently dependent on how much of the script Hayao Miyazaki pens. He wrote all of Whispers of the Heart, is one of two credited writers for the fine Arriety and Up on Poppy Hill, and had no involvement on the two worst movies Ghibli has churned out, The Cat Returns and Tales From Earthsea. He is a genius that understands how to balance character, story, and raw emotion in a way that very few people can. It has unfortunately become apparent that nobody left in Ghibli is in that crew of very few.
The one thing that the script really did get right was the cyclical structure of life. Marnie and Anna both have major issues with their parents, and there’s another woman with an estranged parental relationship that pops up later on. I can see why this story is such a huge hit with women, because it’s really made for them. Family means more as a concept to women, who are often the nurturers of children. Being a mother and being a daughter are both important parts of their identity, which ties in nicely to Anna’s quest to find an identity without being a daughter. The twist fires off an emotional gut punch here, and I was really moved by it. It’s depressing to think of these people growing up without a motherly figure, and then having to pass that bitterness onto their daughter until an even worse tragedy prevents anything else from happening. Making me feel a wide range of emotions is what the best Ghibli movies do, and in spite of how annoying Anna can be sometimes, I was happy when she found herself and sad when she was forced to do it alone. That's a success.
I watched this film in Japanese, and the voice acting was really good all around. From everything I've read the English dub script is both the exact same as the subtitled script and a very literal translation. Between that and nothing in here being especially Japanese (It's a European book about a girl that could be from anywhere and an obviously European girl), this should make the sub vs dub battle a non-issue. I would assume that both are fine.
Composing legend Joe Hisaishi sits out scoring this movie, and to give props to the music team that might actually be for the better. Hisaishi’s scores usually carry whimsy, even in situations where it might not be appropriate, and every scene of this movie is too sad to have a score like that. This score is quiet and subtle. It mostly lays off in order to let the sound effects work, and the sound effects definitely work. The mixing is great and it makes for a lovely sounding nature CD. This is also the first Ghibli movie to ever have a theme song. This could have gone wrong so easily, but the result is Fine On The Outside, a song that indie artist Priscilla Ahn has been holding onto for a decade and sent in for this film. I don’t think I could hope to describe how beautiful this song is, except for saying that it gave me more of an emotional reaction than anything in the movie. It’s every bit as magical as Spirited Away, and it puts tears in my eyes to type those words because it’s really about the nostalgia of doing something that I did often as a kid, not interact with others so I could watch Spirited Away. My childhood might not have been the greatest, but Studio Ghibli made it good. It showed me, and I would like to think the world, the power of wonder and imagination in an adult way, all while teaching kids deeper and more valuable life lessons than standard fare, like how being on the opposing side in a conflict doesn’t make someone else's cause worth less, or how even though the environment should be treated as sacred, destruction of it is an extremely necessary evil.
The song stands for more than just an exact parallel of Anna’s story. It stands for the Studio as a whole. It’s about growing up, which Ghibli has done. It’s about watching beauty, which Ghibli has let us do. It’s about going through rough times and acting like nothing is wrong, which is what this movie is for Ghibli. In some ways, it is good that this is the end. Obviously it’s terrible because we will never get the joy of watching a new Ghibli movie, and because to be brutally honest their goal of sending a new wind to shake anime to its core and change the way it was made forever didn’t really get accomplished. But When Marnie Was There is a moderate rough patch for Ghibli, and it’s going out on top before it can get to a really rough patch. This is a sad review, because it’s about a sad movie from a sad place, but it’s still a million times better than Minions or Home or Hotel Transylvania 35. Ghibli can say they’ve never released a movie as bad as some of the worst from Disney’s dark eras. They accepted that 2D animation was past their prime, they accepted that most of their top talent was long gone, and they released a good movie like nothing was wrong. The song, like the studio and especially like Miyazaki, talks frequently about witnessing beauty. It would be a crime to do anything to it, but it would be even worse to take it for granted instead of falling in love with the whimsy of fantasy worlds and the nature of the real one while we escape from the misery of feeling alone in the human created world. I will cry if you die, and I will remember the face of Studio Ghibli. Otsukaresama deshitte, genki de.