When marnie was there (2014)
#When marnie was there (2014) series#
Whether they jumped or were pushed by a sceptical hierarchy is not clear, but their departures follow that of Miyazaki’s son Goro, who after directing Tales from Earthsea (2006) and From up on Poppy Hill (2011) moved on to the broadcaster NHK to direct a CG cel-shaded anime series based on Astrid Lindgren’s fantasy book Ronia the Robber’s Daughter. But as confirmed in the fleeting interview I got when Nishimura and the 42-year-old Yonebayashi passed through London last October, both men have since left the building. Only in 2014 had Marnids then 37-year-old producer Nishimura Yoshiaki, also justly credited with steering the intractable Takahata Isao through the interminable production of his The Tale of the Princess Kaguya (2013), been nominated as heir to Ghibli’s founding producer Suzuki Toshio. Where Arrietty was built around relativities of space and scale, with its characters living among insects and hiding from towering humans, Mamie remoulds time, transposing us through eras to reconnect with our late ancestors’ experiences and stories: both the 50-year-old book itself, and the lives it reaches back further to remember.Īll of which makes it, if not Ghibli’s very finest hour and 43 minutes, then certainly a wondrous and heartfelt keepsake, a bequest from a legendary studio now in a state of suspension. Like Arrietty, it’s dramatically discreet, without the madness of Miyazaki’s fantasias, but rich in visual detail, and steeped in Ghibli’s reverence for the power of nature: the trickiness of the light, the wilfulness of the sea. Yonebayashi’s Marnie moves the story’s present tense to modern-day Hokkaido, Japan’s northern island, but otherwise takes fewer liberties with the moods and meanings of Robinson’s text than, say, Miyazaki did in his 2004 adaptation of Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle Marnie even remains a blue-eyed blonde, to Miyazaki’s reported consternation. According to Yonebayashi, who was also tasked with the adaptation of Mamie, the answer is no – but the book’s Japanese translator did know the man, and Yonebayashi had heard of the episode and even seen photos the man had taken of Burnham Overy. Could this pilgrim possibly have been Miyazaki-san? After all, Marnie appears on his list of 50 great children’s books shortly after The Borrowers (adapted at Ghibli as Arrietty in 2010 by Miyazaki’s former key animator Yo- nebayashi Hiromasa) and The Little Prince (an influence on Miyazaki’s 2013 film The Wind Rises). Given that Japan’s Studio Ghibli has now adapted Marnie at the behest of Miyazaki Hayao, the great animator known for his love of both European landscapes and classic children’s literature, one’s fancies wander. (Sheppard describes him even managing to find a local Japanese resident, who kept in touch and later delivered him a photo of Robinson.) None of the man’s fellow passengers had heard of the village, however, and he was beginning to get rather anxious when the bus drew into Burnham Overy, and he recognised the very windmill that haunts Marnie’s imagination – and then too the Granary which Robinson fictionalised as the Marsh House, and the marsh path to the beach where Anna and Marnie make their magical trysts. In it Sheppard relates the story of a Japanese man, a fan of the book since his youth, who had ventured out on the same coastal bus ride as Anna in hopes of making a pilgrimage to the story’s setting of Little Overton. Robinson’s 1967 children’s classic When Marnie Was There – the story of a solitary and brooding London orphan called Anna who is sent to stay with family friends for a summer on the north Norfolk coast, where she encounters a kindred spirit called Marnie living in the mysterious Marsh House – now comes with a postscript appended by Robinson’s daughter Deborah Sheppard in 2002.
Hiromasa Yonebayashi’s When Marnie Was There transposes a classic of English children’s literature to modern-day Japan to tell the tale of an orphan discovering the dark secrets of her past, in what might well be the last in-house feature from the great animation house Studio Ghibli