Review of Whisper of the Heart

The best sakuga is character acting sakuga, and this movie has that in spades. Extremely impressive art. I can see why this is a popular undercard pick for "favorite Studio Ghibli movie." It's not as somber as Kiki's Delivery Service, but it hits the same general marks while being a bit more down to earth. None of the romance angle did anything for me and I wasn't really rooting for them as a couple by the end. But I was rooting for them as partners. And maybe that's better. I believe they will support each other. Moreover, the girl's arc was all about discovering her drivein life, which is essentially a fantasy for me these days, so that was nice.

Anything that involves the due date cards they used to have in the backs of library books immediately carves itself into my cold heart. I love those things. They make you feel connected to the people who came before you, much more than the current computerized systems. I'm not quite old enough to prefer the card catalog to keyword searching, but I do hate the design of essentially every library search engine I've ever encountered. They may be better than card catalogs by most metrics, but card catalogs weren't offensive.