![]() ![]() The two become the best of friends, but at first it's hard to tell why, other than the fact that they're drawn to each other - mystically, passionately, even dangerously. Like Anna, Marnie is lonely - neglected by her parents and occasionally terrorized by her maids. But what’s this? In one window of the allegedly empty Marsh House, Anna sees Marnie, a beautiful blonde girl about her age. There, Anna finds herself drawn to a mysterious, sprawling, abandoned mansion (dubbed “the Marsh House”), which is reachable for her at low tide. When Anna has an asthma attack, her foster parents send her to an aunt’s house by the seaside, where the air will be clearer. A foster child who lost her biological parents at a young age, this girl seems forever to be poking away at an unhealable wound. ![]() Or rather, she sees herself outside it: Though the film is sympathetic to her self-loathing, it also makes it clear that Anna’s feelings of persecution stem from within. “There’s inside, and there’s outside.” Judging by the forlorn way she looks at her schoolmates playing among themselves, the lonely Anna, we suspect, is very much outside the circle. “In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle,” our heroine Anna, 12, tells us at the beginning of the new Japanese animated film When Marnie Was There, based on Joan G. When Marnie Was There Starts Slow, But You’ll Be Crying by the End It’s the start of the friendship of a lifetime, a fantasy becoming real. But what is developing between them is not a preadolescent crush. Boyishly cropped brunette Anna and exquisitely beautiful Marnie, her long blond hair fluttering, hold hands, exchange hugs and sometime need firm embraces to dry their tears. The feelings in play are as richly textured as the images, which can turn a plump housewife carving a vegetable meal into art. This is a film defined by patience and attention, an adventure of emotional exploration. There are passages of anxiety here, with rising tides and thunderstorms that put the girls in moments of Gothic urgency, but they are few. We wonder who Anna is at heart, whether Marnie’s welcoming attention will encourage her visitor to grow into a wise, caring and generous girl. They connect quickly, but keep secrets from each other, and us. We watch it unfold shifting between modern scenes apparently genuine and others seemingly two generations old that suggest dreamlike memories. Who is Marnie? That’s one of the film’s key questions. On one of those tours she encounters a seaside mansion occupied by a charming girl named Marnie, who becomes Anna’s first friend. ![]() Suffering a bout of asthma, she is sent away from the city for a fresh-air vacation, staying with a caring couple who encourage her to explore the sandy beach. Anna keeps her adoptive mother at arm’s length, calling her Auntie. Moving the action from the east of England to eastern Japan and moving the story to the present, it retains the basic themes.Īnna, a lonely foster child, never connected to the kind woman who took her in following the deaths of her mother and grandmother. The latter may look more realistic, but often feel far less.įeeling is the central focus of “When Marnie Was There,” a modest adaptation of Joan G. How regrettable it would be if such lushly hand-drawn 2-D movies were no longer available to young viewers who favor brash computer-generated films. True, they are often minimal on action, but always priceless in imagination. Its revered catalog of beautifully visualized, sensitively expressed children’s programming, which created the Oscar-winning “Spirited Away,” has been underperforming at box offices in Japan and internationally. Japan’s beloved animation empire, Studio Ghibli, is apparently saying sayonara. Robinson’s 1967 novel, as the house that Miyazaki built goes out quietly. REVIEW: Feeling is the central focus of “When Marnie Was There,” a modest adaptation of Joan G. Review: 'When Marnie Was There' is a fine swan song for Studio Ghibli Reviews (continued) Minneapolis Star Tribune ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |