Whisper of the Heart – Mimi wo sumaseba (1995)

Directed by: Yoshifumi Kondô | 116 minutes | animation, drama | Original voice cast: Yoko Honna, Issey Takahashi, Takashi Tachibana, Shigeru Muroi, Shigeru Tsuyuguchi, Keiju Kobayashi, Yorie Yamashita, Maiko Kayama, Yoshimi Nakajima, Minami Takayama, Mayumi Izuka

The early adolescent Shizuku Tsukishima lives with her parents and older sister in a flat in Tokyo. She writes poems, chatters with her friends, argues with her sister and reads more library books than the average adolescent class put together. One day, Shizuku discovers that the books she borrows have previously been borrowed by the same person. And let that just be a boy she hates very much. Or maybe not bloody hated, but still.

In the Japanese animation film ‘Whisper of the Heart’ we follow this high-spirited teenager on his way to a bit of adulthood. That goes in Japanese. She encounters a cat on a train and follows the animal to an elevated part of the city. There’s a wondrous trinkets shop there, run by a kind old boss. At the top of that shop is an apprentice violin maker at work. And that’s exactly the boy Shizuku hates. Or maybe not bloody hated, but still.

This animation film by director Yoshifumi Kondô, who died young, could have just been a Hayao Miyazaki film. Shizuku is the kind of teenage girl who keeps popping up in Japanese anime, especially Miyazaki. A lively type, with the emotions always on level ten. Luckily she’s happy a lot of the time, because if she’s angry, just hide. The humor is always of the mild kind and evil characters are nowhere to be seen.

What ‘Whispers of the Heart’ does well is the perfect mix of humor, poignancy and mystery. That mystery lies in the wonderful trinket shop and in the stories of its equally wonderful owner. The emotion is in our heroine and her fumbling with a first love. That variety ensures that you are never bored. By skipping a few unfinished sidelines, the film could have been shorter.

Despite that unnecessary length, ‘Whisper of the Heart’ is yet another successful Ghibli film for young and old. Touching but never sentimental. With a heroine to lose your heart to (as long as she doesn’t sing, because you don’t want to suffer that), a wise story and a nagging melancholy for the things that are lost. And with a prominent role for John Denver’s evergreen ‘Take Me Home Country Roads’. That too.