If you’ve ever lost a loved one, you’ve experienced the emptiness, depression, and longing to retain every memory. How are you going to live without them? Old photographs, bedrooms, and other significant places draw old memories which bring solace, but also the painful reminder that you will never see them again. When Marnie Was There — the last film from Studio Ghibli before a hiatus — is a painful and inspirational depiction of this feeling’s many forms: death, neglect, and alienation.
Anna Sassaki, an awkward girl with little sense of gender conventions, is an asthmatic orphan being raised by a good-natured couple in a metropolitan city in Japan. But once she finds a government cheque reimbursing the couple for their care, she becomes suspicious of their intentions and grows even more distant.
After having a scary asthma attack, Anna’s doctor recommends she go relax in the country where the air is cleaner and life simpler. When she temporarily moves in with her adoptive aunt and uncle in a small town, she befriends a young girl named Marnie who lives in an old mansion across a lake that many of locals believe is haunted.
As their relationship develops and Marnie randomly disappears or confuses someone else’s name for Anna’s, it becomes clear that Marnie is not a corporeal person from the present. She might be a ghost or just an imaginary friend.
Anna, unlike heroes such as Frozen’s Elsa, has no magic, but only her will. The flights of fancy are not merely a ploy to attract kids to the theatre like so many animated films, but an evocative technique meant to help us understand what is going on in Anna’s head. Unlike Disney’s protagonists, Anna may not be beautiful or charismatic, but her anxieties and self-loathing are relatable and truthful. She learns to overcome universal feelings of loss and self-doubt without the help of a Prince Charming.
The film’s poignancy and pathos derive from how each character tries to hold onto old memories of loved ones through synthetic substitutes. Anna’s adoptive aunt and uncle are trying to preserve what they have of their grown up, absent daughter by taking Anna in. Anna is given their daughter’s old clothes, and, in an even more telling moment, the aunt says, “Your room’s upstairs. It was my daughter’s room. It’d be sad to clear everything so I left it as it was.”
Other supporting characters arrive, like an older woman who spends her days painting the old mansion across the lake and a fisherman who almost never speaks. All these characters are intertwined not only by their connected past, but also their desire to recreate it: the woman through her paintings and the fisherman through his routine. Motifs of photographs, sketches, diaries, letters, and old buildings reinforce this aching feeling of trying to preserve memories of loved ones.
When Marnie Was There is a profoundly affecting experience that comes as close as any cinema to evoking real, human emotions. Like almost all of Ghibli’s work, this is a film for both children and adults that doesn’t patronize its audience with blind adherence to a forced formula or cheap sentimentality.
Where most animated flicks try to make their way into people’s hearts with catchy pop songs, When Marnie Was There earns our tears with its gradual pace that recalls Japanese master Yasujiro Ozu. It’s nice to see subtle characterization that doesn’t underestimate its audience’s capacity to engage with grounded, unexaggerated characters. Any single frame of this beautiful film, which draws its visual inspiration from impressionist paintings, has an elegantly soft touch and the emotional weight of a dumbbell.
This film floats like a butterfly but stings like a tattooing needle. It make us consider the imprints that have been left on our own skin.
