『思い出のマーニー』 When Marnie Was There

[rtil]

When Marnie Was There - Studio Ghibli - Trailer (Omoide no Marnie - 思い出のマーニー)
Directed by   Hiromasa Yonebayashi (Arrietty)

Anna hasn't a friend in the world - until she meets Marnie among the sand dunes. But Marnie isn't all she seems...

An atmospheric ghost story with truths to tell about friendship, families and loneliness. Anna lives with foster parents, a misfit with no friends, always on the outside of things. Then she is sent to Norfolk to stay with old Mr and Mrs Pegg, where she runs wild on the sand dunes and around the water. There is a house, the Marsh House, which she feels she recognizes - and she soon meets a strange little girl called Marnie, who becomes Anna's first ever friend. Then one day, Marnie vanishes.

A new family, the Lindsays, move into the Marsh House. Having learnt so much from Marnie about friendship, Anna makes firm friends with the Lindsays - and learns some strange truths about Marnie, who was not all she seemed...

comes out July 19th in Japan, expecting a fairly limited release outside of it. It looks like a pretty film, with the same kind of mellow tones that Arrietty had. if i'm not mistaken this is also the first Ghibli film where the two leads are both female. don't think there's anything romantic going on between them but i like the change. a lot of people are saying this is the make or break film for Ghibli because of the older generation of Ghibli moving away from feature films, but i think that's a bit of an exaggeration. still, it is an important film for Yonebayashi and i look forward to see how far he's come since Arrietty.

[crackers]

ghost stories are cool ill watch this

[ZennyPLUS]

Oh so there are some fantasy elements to this movie? cool.

[rtil]

probably about as much as there was in the wind rises but it seems that way yes

[ZennyPLUS]

Couple of my friends were worried that this film is moving away from the fantasy foundations of ghibli, sort of like with their last film, but to be fair, the borrowers had plenty of fantasy to it, i just don't get the critics of it. sure it didn't have flying machines or spirits, but it was still a fantasy film.

[basketweaver]

interesting

[Bamyasi]

The fact that this thread is almost a year old makes me want to kill myself, because I feel like I read it yesterday.

So does the fact that this might be Ghibli's last movie.

My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service were the first movies to make cry, but also the first I truly fell in love with.

Like I actually liked My Neighbor Totoro so much when I was 5-6 that I would have panic attacks while/after watching it because I wanted so badly for it to be real (even in childhood I was a pathetic weeb).

I had an entire paragraph or two formulating in my head about this movie; like how the writing wasn't good, or how there's very little character development, dramatic tension, etc.

I really did, not that it matters, but truth be told I'm still left utterly critically disarmed by these movies, and any criticism I could muster for When Marnie Was There would just be through someone else's lens, like my mother's.

And really, barring stuff like Chie the Brat, Only Yesterday and Whisper of the Heart, the studio's output was never about character development anyway. The underdeveloped quality of the characters is part of what makes watching their movies so cathartic really. Live action movies can't have that effect, because the characters go on living as actors, and neither can Pixar movies, because everything resolved so neatly after the (typically) over-the-top climax, after which the denouement always leaves room for a sequel.

Sure I sort of wish Yonebayashi could have found a way to balance the character development of Ghibli's realist slice of life stories with the wonder of their surrealist slice of life stories, but they're still as good throughout as the best scenes in a Shinkai or Hosoda movie.

Anna is probably the only lead in a Ghibli movie I've ever identified with, barring those in the three aforementioned by degrees. I just kind of wish there had been more of her.

Whatever, I still cried.

I'm still crying a little.

[Bamyasi]

[spoiler]Did I mention the music's great? Do I even have to?
[/spoiler]

[SHADOWFOX2]

You should mention the music's great.