Rent Whisper of the Heart (1995)

Mostly Just Lovely - Whisper of the Heart review by griggs

Every time Studio Ghibli puts a cat, a violin or a whisper of magic on screen, I brace myself for something that wrecks me a little. This one just gave me a nice afternoon.

Shizuku spends the film working out whether wanting to write and being able to write are the same thing — the smartest bit of teenage panic in here. Seiji's already sworn himself to violins, which only makes her not-knowing louder. Their romance stays pleasingly small: awkward, earnest, enormous at fourteen, embarrassing by twenty.

The animation does brilliant work: the climb up to the library, Nishi's cluttered antique shop, rooms that somehow glow. "Country Roads" gets passed around half the cast and, against the odds, survives.

My problem is that beneath the craft, the story is straightforward, and the middle stretch doesn't quite carry the runtime. I kept waiting for the film to open up into something stranger, and it mostly keeps being lovely.

Rare teenage animated romantic drama - Whisper of the Heart review by AP

'Whispers of the Heart' took me by surprise. Set in a real city landscape in which young teen Shizuku pursues her passion for reading (mysteriously preceded in her choice of books by someone called Seiji), and allowed to do so by parents who are remarkably understanding She finds herself one day following a fat cat who boards a train at the same station as her. When the cat alights, she does too and, following it, she discovers a curio shop at the top of the city in a quiet enclave where she is welcomed by its elderly owner who is an artisan repairer of almost anything. It turns out that he is also the grandfather of the Seiji who is her fellow reader and who attends the same school as she does.

Seiji wants to become a violin maker and is allowed by his parents to try out for two months in Cremona. While he's away, Shizuku, who is footloose about her future and is unhappy being directionless decides to write a novel. Encouraged by Seiji's grandfather, she does so, but not before her elder sister has alerted their parents to Shizuku's declining marks at school. Her parents decide that if the novel is vital to Shizuku, she should finish it.....

It's a really sweet story, and Shizuku and Seiji's energy and joie de vivre I found infectious. I loved it.