Whisper of the Heart is my personal favorite Ghibli movie. It’s a great movie about love, it’s a great movie about ambition, it’s a great movie about the passion and the amount of hard work it takes to be really good at anything. It’s also about how choosing something and committing to something often looks a little bit crazy. For instance: proposing marriage to your girlfriend when you’re both just exiting middle school and you are additionally dropping out of school and leaving the country. That looks pretty crazy. Possibly, is pretty crazy. On the other hand… what if you and your girlfriend are just two people who figured out who you were earlier than other people?
Shizuku Tsukishima is a middle school student whose life is spent going from exam to exam. She checks out books from the library and begins to notice that there’s a boy who has checked them all out before her. His name is Seiji Amasawa. She begins to develop a little bit of a crush on this fictional boy. Unrelatedly, this other guy has popped up in her life. He is really annoying! It would be terrible if he were Seiji!
Yeah, yeah. You know what’s up there.
Eventually Shizuku gets to know the annoying boy and before she puts two and two together on the Seiji front she’s learned about his dream to go to Cremona and learn how to become a master violin maker. When he leaves Japan for a two month trial apprenticeship, she decides she’s going to do something, too. She’s going to prove, to herself, that she cares about something as much as he does. During those two months, she’s going to write a novel. To hell with studying for exams!
One of the great things about Whisper of the Heart is the way it takes certain things that were already established in the Ghibli playbook—a sense of light and of beauty, an interest in stories about breaking from and embracing tradition—and did them in a distinctive way. The result is something that’s distinctly a Ghibli movie without feeling like an faux Miyazaki movie.1 The romantic landscape in this movie is the city, not the country. The playful synths in Yuji Nomi’s score replace the kind of sweeping orchestral music Joe Hisaishi wrote. The romanticized European culture you see in Kiki’s Delivery Service or Castle in the Sky or Porco Rosso is still present, but as charming antiques. Instead, what you love in this movie are the items in Shizuku’s cluttered apartment, like the rice maker, or her headphones. Whisper of the Heart is about a recognizably contemporary Japan and not some other time or other place.2
In their first couple meetings, Seiji teases Shizuku about her version of “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” which she’s called “Concrete Roads.” (Later, he claims not to remember doing this.) Shizuku goes back to the song’s original love of the country, and in the opening lines of her novel she also invokes the woods, but I think what’s special about her initial attempt at “Concrete Roads” is just that she is thinking about her actual life, not some woodland she’s never seen. Sure, she is defeated and falls back on more familiar literary objects, but she’s not satisfied with the draft of her novel, and when I watch the movie I feel like she’s going to keep working at it until she knows how to capture the romance of her city life. Even the glimpses we get of the book show something that is not some forest fantasy, but a floating city made up of “planetoids.”
Whisper of the Heart isn’t an ode to modernity either. Maybe one of the things I like the most about this movie is its gentle embrace of everything old and new: listening to music on your headphones and impromptu singing with strangers even though you consider yourself “tone deaf.” The technology that allowed Seiji to flirt with Shizuku before they’d actually met—i.e., the physical library card catalog—is on the way out. I think there’s a suggestion that this change to a computerized card catalog system is a little regrettable, because it removes one way for people to surprise and meet one another. The great thing about city life is the way everybody’s on top of each other, forcing encounters and coincidences that can become something else, and the last shot of the movie, as the credits roll, is just watching all the people and animals who walk up and down a road. We can even watch a new romance start up.
About that marriage proposal.… Whisper of the Heart is adapted from a manga, the marriage proposal is, as far as I can tell, original to the movie. Here’s an interview with Kondō and Aoi Hiiragi (the mangaka)3:
Kondo: Another difference with shoujo manga is the depiction of romance, right? While I fundamentally viewed it as a love story, as Miyazaki’s storyboards progressed, there seemed to be a stronger emphasis on the message of “introspection and self-improvement.” Despite the tagline, “I’ve found someone I like,” I wonder if this can truly be termed a love story in the conventional shoujo manga sense. In your original work, rather than the two immersing in their own world, they are depicted as “standing side by side, looking far ahead.”
Hiiragi: I see. Even so, the last line from Seiji had quite the impact.
Kondo: That line was Miyazaki’s idea. He said it would be weak if Seiji simply told Shizuku, “I love you.” The line is more of a resolution, looking beyond that white haze and deciding to walk forward together. That’s why it works.…
“That’s why it works” is maybe an overstatement. The first time I watched this movie I thought the ending, where Seiji asks Shizuku to marry him when he’s done with his studies in Cremona, was insane. I thought everything leading up to it was great, but that moment was so crazy it made the rest of the movie feel like it wasn’t really engaged with reality. Whenever I rewatch the movie, though, the ending feels a little less strange. Some of that is probably just because now I know it’s coming, so I’m emotionally prepared for it. When it comes out of nowhere, it’s almost shocking.
However, I also think it has to do with what I said at the beginning of the newsletter—that Seiji and Shizuku both have a strong sense of who they are by the end of the movie. They support each other in ways that don’t hamper the other’s independence. It’s not that they’d be ready to get married right then and there, of course, but now when I watch this movie, I think, when would they be more ready to say, yes, you’re the person I want to go through my life with? When you know, you know.…
Ultimately the decision to have the movie end with a marriage proposal mirrors the way both Seiji and Shizuku make serious choices to commit to their work. Seiji is dropping out of school and studying in another country. Shizuku risks her chance at getting into a good high school by staying up all night writing and neglecting her studies. When she finishes her novel she knows it’s not good, that wanting to write a novel isn’t actually enough to do so, a realization that causes her to burst into tears. But she’s not giving up, and that’s why we can sense, watching the movie, that she will really become an artist one day.
There’s also a story within Whisper of the Heart—not the one Shizuku’s writing—about how Seiji’s grandfather loved a woman and promised to reunite with her after what was meant to be a brief separation, but the unexpected advent of war meant he never found her again. Obviously, he moved on with his life (otherwise, Seiji would not exist), but this story is a reminder that even serious and sincere promises sometimes cannot be kept. We don’t really know what will happen to these two kids, but we know what will happen if everything works out for them the way that they want. So while the ending still feels like a lot to me… I’m convinced these days that it’s the right ending for the movie.
What will always be bittersweet about Whisper of the Heart is that it was meant to be the first of many movies that Yoshifumi Kondō would make for Ghibli. Unfortunately, though, Kondō died three years later. He never made another movie. The light-filled city landscape of this movie remains singular. It is one beautiful movie that doesn’t lead anywhere. Still—what a movie!
This is a day early because I’m supposed to have something go out “this weekend”… if that doesn’t happen well… you never saw this bullet point.
My impression of the Japanese school system from watching anime: you are always in school. If you are bad at school, you get more school. But if you are good at school, you also get more school. If you go on vacation, it’s a school trip. If you are really bad at school, you drop into some pit of eternal fire, where you still have to go to school. It may seem as if there are adults who have graduated from school, but in fact, there is no point at which you stop going to school. Even Shizuku’s mother is in school.
There’s a kind of flexibility to the faces in this movie that I really like and which feels distinctive. I can’t quite put my finger on what does it—it’s partly that they’re a bit more cartoonish at times, but I don’t think that’s the only reason.
Shizuku has been immortalized as the lo fi beats girl.
Seiji pretending to be a jerk to impress the girl he likes… a mistake many have made before him and which many will make again. The cat fixed it though. By the time he gets back from Italy he knows that what you do is give her your coat and also fail to bike her up a hill.
Seriously… that biking scene is so cute.
There is a spinoff movie, The Cat Returns. I have seen it once and my memory is that it is mediocre.
“It’s not easy to walk your own road. You’ve got only yourself to blame” is one of those lines that’s always rolling around in my head, like “everything’s temporary! that don’t excuse nothing!” from Moonstruck.
You can tell that Shizuku’s family is significantly less well off than her friends’ families, and it’s implied that’s because they’ve made slightly off-the-beaten-path decisions, which I think gives that moment a little more weight.
Though Miyazaki was very involved with this movie.
Though now that so many of us romanticize the 90s, it almost might as well be.
Here’s a similar answer from another interview:
At first, I did wonder, ‘Would a middle school student really say that?’ (laughs). Discussions like ‘Wouldn’t high school students be more likely to say that?’ were held with Mr. Miyazaki. Regardless, the main purpose of this scene was to convey the ability to honestly express one’s feelings and for the other person to accept them. As someone who has regrets about his youth (laughs), I tried to express the way I wish things had been. It’s often said nowadays that young people don’t go deep in relationships, they superficially get along to avoid conflict. As an older person like me who had a lot of heated debates in youth, I felt it was okay for such things to happen. I’ve also heard from school teachers that many students either don’t get emotionally moved or can’t express their emotions. We were conscious of these points. Some time ago, speaking honestly could make you the butt of jokes or ostracized, but times are changing. That’s why we decided to include such a straightforward scene. To put it in Miyazaki’s style, just saying ‘I like you’ is weak. In general, that’s the pattern in shoujo manga. If we really wanted to express what the boy felt, a stronger statement like ‘Marry me’ made sense. That line shouldn’t cause the world of the story to collapse, it should be convincing based on what’s come before. If that was done right, then even saying such a thing, the girl would genuinely accept it. We confirmed this approach from the beginning. Mr. Miyazaki also gauged reactions on this scene from various young women, even colleagues, playfully inquiring, ‘Would you respond affirmatively to such a proposal?’ (laughs). Some quipped, ‘Maybe after ten more dates?’, but one lady ended up tying the knot with a decade-long friend by the narrative’s conclusion, leaving Mr. Miyazaki quite content. So, the line was crafted on the premise that it would be convincing.
I love it so much!
& re: the proposal—I think it works if you're able to view it from within the middle-school perspective. To an adult viewer, it might seem either stupid (if we assume it can't lead to a real marriage) or horrifying (if we assume it dooms them to be together forever despite any changes that will arise before they're adults). But to kids that age, I think it just reads as, "Yes, this is what I want. I want to be with you forever." I think it's true to who they are & what they want & believe in that moment. I believe a certain kind of teen (though not all) would absolutely make that kind of promise, & the movie isn't really about how either of them feels about it seven years later, but just how it's true to them in that season. I buy it.
this was beautiful. i love this movie so much