When Marnie Was There

WRITER'S NOTE:  When Marnie Was There is being shown in select cities in the U.S. with an English dub featuring Hollywood voice talent like Hailee Steinfeld, John C. Reilly and Ellen Burstyn.  However, when I saw the film at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago, Illinois this weekend, it was shown in the original Japanese soundtrack with English subtitles.  And so, this review is based on that, and I will not be able to comment on or critique the celebrity voice over dub that is playing in most theaters.


If Studio Ghibli, the acclaimed Japanese animation studio behind such classics as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke, is truly closing its doors for good after its founder and lead director, Hayao Miyazaki, retired, and if this is truly their final film, then the studio's legacy closes on a quiet and bittersweet note.  When Marnie Was There is a mystery at heart, but it unfolds slowly and with a certain deliberate ease.  Like a novel you would read on a summer afternoon, the pacing is languid but engaging.  This is a haunting family film that, like the best films in the genre, can be enjoyed by adults and kids on a different level.

Much like the 2009 animated feature Coraline, or Studio Ghbili's own Spirited Away, the film deals with a young girl who is pulled from her own usual world, and into the supernatural.  However, unlike those films, the story here is not an adventure.  It's the somber, leisurely story of Anna (voice by Sara Takatsuki), a 12-year-old girl who feels like an outcast in pretty much every aspect of her life.  In the film's opening scene, she sits alone on a bench as children play, drawing the scene in her sketchbook.  In her narration, she tells us "There is an inside and an outside, and I am outside".  Her personal life is filled with tragedy, as her parents died when she was very young, and she now lives with a foster mother.  The foster mother obviously cares for Anna and wants to help her, but the young girl refuses to open up to her, or to anyone else for that matter.  Anna feels she does not belong in the world, and although it is never actually brought up in the film's dialogue, we feel like her depression may be so severe that she is considering ending her own life, as in the scene when she breaks down and admits that she feels she is ugly and worthless compared to others around her.

When Anna suffers from a particularly severe asthma attack, her foster mother takes the advice of a local doctor, and sends Anna out of the city for the summer and to the country to live with some relatives in their seaside home.  She moves in with a jovial couple named Kiyomasa (Susumu Terajima), who builds wooden toys, and Setsu (Toshie Negishi), a large woman with an even larger laugh.  The couple are empty nesters whose children have long since moved away, so they welcome Anna, even though she feels estranged from them.  But as Anna starts to explore the local area surrounding the home, she becomes strangely fascinated by an abandoned old mansion that sits on the edge of the marsh.  She feels drawn to the house, though she can't explain why, and she even starts to dream about the house and its former occupants.  In particular, she sees a young girl about her age with flowing yellow hair in one of the upper windows of the house in her dreams.  The mystery deepens even further when it seems like at certain times of the day, the house is no longer abandoned, but truly alive with the sounds of a party coming from within.  And just like in her dreams, there is that same gentle girl waiting for Anna and drawing her closer to the house.

The girl is Marnie (Kasumi Arimura), and although Anna is not sure whether this girl is a dream come to life or perhaps a ghostly apparition, she wants to know more about her and they become instant friends.  Marnie pleads that Anna keep their relationship a secret, and brings her inside her mansion home, which is mannered and seems like it comes from a completely different time period.  There are many people inside the house when Anna visits, and they are all dressed in period clothes that seem to come from the early 20th Century.  However, despite the lavish and celebratory mood of the house, Marnie admits that like Anna, she too is lonely and not happy in her life.  As the story unfolds and the mystery of what truly is happening in the marsh house deepens (Why is it sometimes abandoned, and sometimes alive with celebration?  Why is it that whenever Anna goes to visit, she ends up unconscious and lying alone somewhere different in the small town?), Anna herself slowly begins to open up and becomes driven to discover the history of the mysterious house.

There is a certain unsettling tone to When Marnie Was There, but the movie never comes across as heavy or depressing.  Even when Anna seems like she has succumbed to her depression, we can still sense a certain spirit, and are happy when she becomes driven for the first time in a while by the mystery of the marsh house.  Director Hiromasa Yonebayashi (The Secret World of Arrietty) is never in a hurry to give us answers to his mystery, except for the end, when the answers suddenly seem to come flying at us one after another.  This makes the film somewhat bottom heavy, and I do wish the answers to the mystery had been kind of spaced out a little bit more, but it does not hurt the film or the story he is trying to tell, which itself is based on a 1967 novel by Joan G. Robinson.  The pacing is slow but never boring, and actually finds a way to build our interest by the way it rolls out the information a little at a time for most of the film.

And just like all Studio Ghibli films, the animation and attention to detail is absolutely stunning, making it worth seeing on the big screen just for the visuals alone.  Unlike the last Ghibli feature to be released in the U.S., the gorgeous The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, this is a more traditionally animated film, but that doesn't make the look of it any less stunning.  As the end credits play out to the film's haunting and sad theme song, "Fine on the Outside" by Priscilla Ahn, we get to see many of the settings that were featured, from the local country scenes, to the opulent design of the mansion house.  It's here that we truly get to admire the detail that the artists put into the different settings, so it's definitely worth sitting through the end credits just for that.  It almost seems to serve as a final farewell to the talented artists, if this truly is their final feature they get to work on as a team.

When Marnie Was There is a beautiful and somber film that I think children can really appreciate.  It speaks to the social anxieties that many children around the age of the main character face, and also delivers a compelling mystery that is sure to captivate them.  It is sad to think that we may no longer get to see any more films from the legendary studio, but at least their legacy gets to end on a note that is engaging and a little bittersweet.

See the movie times in your area or buy the DVD at Amazon.com!

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