Review of Whisper of the Heart
"Mimi wo sumaseba" it's a nice and warm story about a young girl, Shizuko, who's trying to find her way to adulthood. Apparently, she's not really into anything but she slowly discovers the wonderful joy of writing and she recognizes it as her own true talent. Meanwhile she deals with her first, true love, in a simple, tender and still very romantic way that today is a bit forgotten. An enjoyable 90's pictures of Japanese life that I appreciated in many levels, with the moving and magic Studio Ghibli's touch. Story: Good, great subjects always are hidden in the everyday life and this is quitethe speciality of Japanese narration sensibility (think of Murakami Haruki, the extraordinary is in the ordinary).
Narration: The rhythm is good too, but somewhere in the middle I detected a bit of slowness, maybe due to the fact that a lot of themes were conveyed together and It took a bit to unravelling them. But perhaps this is exactly the way it was meant to be: the story felt by the heart of a teenage girl. She's running over important things, rushing, just only as the youth knows, and abruptely stopping by, puzzled by something very little. You can exactly feel what's in her heart still ( and here we have the good job) without those long and unbearable (and sensless) dialogues that nowadays are so common in anime and movies.
Characters: You'd say they're a bit plain, and that's the truth: we have the normal and common people that always are in Studio Ghibli's world. And that's for me a good point: I never understood those sensational and too eccentric characters, the way they are spoils their possibility to change, mature, become something in their lives. So, yes, Shizuko is a regular girl, so it is the boy she's in love with, so it's her family and so it's the suburb she lives in. But isn't it a very clever way to discover reality and true dephts of things? This is animation depicting reality with the precise intent to give it a new developed meaning (you'd say it's an Ermeneutic circle).
Art&animation: we don't have to forgot the peculiar, simple, light but still bright style of animation, the perfect way the studio ghibli does, 'cause here we have the perfect correspondence between 1) something to express (which I alredy talked about) 2) the way it is expressed. And to me this is the very signal of a very well done job.
Music: how to forget the reason why I first discovered this animated movie? The song they're always singin', John denver's "country roads", it's a classical and it shows itself the meaning of what I was talking about.
Finding the proper way to be, finding who we really are: one can leave only if it's clear where he comes from. The importance of family and roots that are not to bound us, to cage us, but to expand our possibilities.
Let's say: I can't wait to leave, and see the world and grow a lot, just because then I know where I could return to.