Presumably, if reports are to be believed as of this year (or last), When Marnie Was There is the final theatrical feature from Studio Ghibli (this on the heels of also presumed - for real this time - retirements for Miyazaki and Yakahata, who made their recent films as The Wind Rises and Princess Yaguya). This makes me sad, but mostly as this movie is itself so painfully sad all over. It's a tearjerker, without any equivocation, and that's not a bad thing as any movie if it's done right - maybe the greatest Japanese animated film ever made, Grave of the Fireflies, is a cry-every-other-minute film - but here, it's almost too much, and deals with pain and loss and alienation in such a way that it ultimately is disappointing that it ends up in a plot 'twist'. Or is it a reveal? This does, seemingly, take audiences to a more realistic place than some other Ghibli films - I was reminded of Whisper of the Heart, also a movie about an artistically talented girl who gets a connection to a special person, only for her own existential path to be more complicated - and that's certainly welcome. It follows this girl Anna who has asthma and is actually a foster child, and is sent by her Auntie to get some fresh air for the summer with relatives on a coastal island (I think it's an island). There, one evening, she meets Marnie, a blond-haired girl who lives in the mansion that Anna finds so beautiful. They become very close friends, but something doesn't quite seem right in some ways.
Of course as friends they make it a 'secret' not to tell anyone. Who might Anna tell anyway? No friends really (she shoves some away due to her social awkwardness), and not her guardians (one voiced in the English dub by John C. Reilly, also welcome). But Marnie? It seems less clear - except that, if one can see pretty quickly, she's not exactly who she says she is. Is she an 'imaginary friend' as Anna comes to the conclusion once discovering new people moving in to the mansion? Or what about a ghost? In a manner of speaking, yes. But the details of why Marnie is no longer 'there' become the emotional cornerstone of the entire film, and certainly not an easy one to take.
When Marnie Was There is unabashedly sentimental stuff. I wondered at times if I might just be, as a grown man, just not the right audience for this material. But then I've gravitated to most of the Ghibli library, even when there are characters outside of my frame of reference. And it shouldn't matter, the themes are universal, up to a point, of a little girl who is alone and feels alone and is with someone else who also feels alone and they have each other. That part I can get. What is a little distant this time around is... frankly, a certain low-key energy for at least the first half of the film. I hasten to say the word 'boring' because it isn't, and there is a difference with low-key, where things are just... moving along, a little slowly, leisurely, without any deference to anything or any major stakes.
The second half picks up, to be sure, as the mystery of who Marnie is or where she was from, and the significance of the silo and what might have happened there. But by the end, as a sort of exposition dump happens and a major reveal happens about the past of Marnie, and Anna herself, it's slightly unsatisfying. Perhaps I should've expected this - I called that she was a ghostly figure fairly early on, and there's no real trace of fantasy stuff outside of it. On the plus side, as a given with Ghibli, the animation is breathtaking and sweet and sumptuous, and in all of the ways that are subtle and exacting of the place and time. This is warm summer with water and beaches and big mansions and the like, and it has the weight of this place much as Whisper of the Heart carried the simplicity of city life to a T.
So what was I expecting that the movie didn't give me? I don't know. I can't not recommend When Marnie Was There for admirers of the studio, and I'm sure aficionados will seek it out anyway. I may be responding on a first watch to its elegiac tone (albeit at the core it's a movie about finding someone to love in a platonic sense, I think) and I wonder if there was any intention on the part of the filmmakers to finish off their studio's output (at least for now) on a story that deals with separation and loss (or lack) of identity and trust in adult figures. You can get the napkins and handkerchiefs ready, but it just wasn't totally great for me, at least up to the (admittedly) high standards of Ghibli, or even this director, who's previous film The Secret World of Arriety I liked very much.
