Review of Whisper of the Heart

The best way I can describe the experience of watching Whisper of the Heart is to compare it to a critical scene in the film itself, where the protagonist Shizuku first stumbles across the old antique shop that will come to serve as her inspiration. It’s a quiet, stuffy, ancient place, tarnished trinkets from bygone ages covered in the dust and cobwebs of time’s unyielding march forward. It would be so easy to overlook such a quiet, shut-off corner of the universe in today’s much more active world. Yet there’s something enchanting about the place that can’t help but draw you in. There’s a realmagic in these stodgy old antiques, their old luster still shining through the rust. And the longer the seconds pass, Shizuku’s gaze fixating on an enigmatic statue of a besuited cat with gleaming emerald eyes, you realize that this quaint little shop has wormed its way into your heart, like an old memory you only just remembered was special to you. It’s a quiet, pensive kind of love rather an a boistrous, energized love, but that in and of itself has its own special charm. And that’s really Whisper of the Heart in a nutshell: an unexpectedly blissful delight of a film, winning you over bit by bit until you easily surrender to its simple, homespun charm.

The story, easily the most naturalistic and grounded of any Miyazaki film I’ve seen thus far, centers around Shizuku, your typical junior high student living in the big city. Living in a cramped apartment with her family and going through the same routine day in, day out, she can’t help but long for excitement and adventure, some way to inspire a change in her listless life. That opportunity presents itself when she follows a wandering cat on a whim and ends up at the aforementioned antique shop, and her long-gestating creative aspirations start bubbling forth. Slowly but surely, she realizes that she may be a writer at heart, and the film follows her artistic awakening over the course of an otherwise ordinary year in an otherwise ordinary life. There’s a mysterious name that keeps popping up on slips of all the library books she checks out, a crisis with a friend’s one-sided crush, a somewhat arrogant classmate whom she slowly grows close to, and the guidance of the shop’s elderly caretaker, a man whose sense of whimsy and imagination inspire her to take life into her own hands. And all along the way, she’s faced with a choice between the stability and safety of walking down the same path... or taking a leap of faith and following the dream she’s only just realizing she had.

It’s that central question that elevates Whisper of the Heart from a good film to a genuinely great one: whether or not it’s worth taking the risk to follow your dreams when the potential consequences are so terrifying to think about. I’m an amateur fiction writer myself; I actually wrote my first novel at the age of 10, and I’ve been refining and updating it over the years. And I can tell you this, the way this film depicts Shizuku’s literary struggles was painfully real at times. Writing a story- hell, pretty much any creative art- is one of the most emotionally vulnerable hobbies one can pursue. It requires you to look inside yourself for you own truths, display those secret parts of yourself for the world to see, and pray to god people understand it. A criticism of something you poured your heart and soul into can’t help but feel like an attack on you yourself. It’s anxiety-producing as hell, is my point. And sometimes, it can be really hard to put yourself out there and get those words down, because there’s always that nagging thought that they’ll never speak the same truths on the page as they did in your head. Even if it’s something you love doing, the stress of allowing yourself to be that vulnerable, both to others’ opinions and your own self-critique, can be so overwhelming that at times you wonder if it’s even worth the effort.

And it’s that fact that Whisper of the Heart nails along every step of Shizuku’s coming of age. Her self-doubt was my self-doubt; her inability to see the value in what she could do, while holding everyone else up on a pedestal, is the struggle any young artist will inevitably go through. The boy she becomes close to is an aspiring violin maker, and she can’t help but compare herself negatively to his high pedigree, unable to realize that he sees the same value in her work that she sees in his. That particular nugget of truth has been one of the hardest things for me to internalize over my many years working on creative projects alongside people whose talent I recognize more than my own; you always see the best in everyone else over yourself, but that doesn’t mean they’re not still seeing the best in you. It’s such a truthfully realized depiction of coming into your own as an agent of your own voice, learning how to trust yourself and let your hang-ups fall by the wayside. I’m actually feeling legitimately inspired to recommit to some old projects I’ve left by the wayside and give them the attention and care I know they deserve. That’s the magic of this film; it understands how hard the creative process is, but also how rewarding it is when you finally let people in to the weird, wild world you want to share with them.

Aiding that sense of wonder is the film’s presentation, which, like I mentioned above, apes a very deliberate quaint, nostalgic aesthetic, almost like it’s preserved in amber from the ravages of time. It’s easily Miyazaki’s most realistic work yet, eschewing the fantastical imagery of his previous films (aside from a few visually gorgeous cutaways to the story Shizuku ends up writing) in favor of the cozy naturalism of whatever the Japanese equivalent of a Rockerfeller painting is. It’s got a corny throwback sort of vibe, between the warm summer colors, lush and homespun score, and the occasionally treacly dialogue all delivered expertly by the dub cast, all intended to put you in the same mindset as Shizuku herself, awash in the possibilities and desire to just put your pen to the page and get out the unfiltered mess of imagination swirling around in your head. In any lesser film it would be too much of a throwback, sinking into cheesy histrionics and feeling as stuffy and outdated as a gas lantern. But excepting maybe a handful of overly corny moments, the sincerity shines through, and much like that old antique shop, you find yourself getting swept up in the simple magic and feeling energized to explore everything it has to offer.

Whisper of the Heart is the best kind of simple, the kind of simple that you’ve seen a million times before but never get tired of going back for more of. It’s a moving portrait of an artist’s awakening and coming of age wrapping in a feel-good package of Ghibli-branded whimsy and comfort. I get the feeling this is a film I’ll be coming back to a lot; they way it speaks to my experience as a young writer is truly remarkable. It’s a portrait of an ordinary life in search of something much more extraordinary, and in that process it finds it own unique magic that I will likely be revisiting many times to come.