Very young children may be a bit hazy about the definition of melancholy, but that doesn’t mean they can’t feel it in their bones. When Marnie Was There may help articulate it for them. Studio Ghibli has made a lucrative industry out of making movies that respect the intelligence of kids, but rarely have they – or anyone else – so emphatically captured the chilling loneliness of youth, and the sneaking, resonant suspicion that maybe you aren’t wanted.
Based on the novel by Joan G. Robinson, When Marnie Was There opens with 12-year-old Anna, isolated from her peers and rejecting the love of her foster parents after she suffers an asthma attack. She doesn’t hug them, she only apologizes that they have to pay her hospital bills. Not knowing what to do, Anna’s parents take her doctor’s advice and send her to live with relatives for the summer, in a sleepy town next to a marsh, where a dilapidated mansion catches Anna’s fancy in a way none of the local children can.
Studio Ghibli
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In this dreamy old relic, bordered by a rising tide that carries the path away every night, Anna finds strange solace. Unexpectedly, she also finds a young girl named Marnie, who claims to live there even though it’s obviously uninhabitable. Except there are parties there every night, and servants who abuse young Marnie in ways that shock Anna. The two of them repeatedly abscond, bonding together in clandestine communions, in the wee hours of the evening.
Writer/director Hiromasa Yonebayashi (The Secret World of Arrietty) lets the mysteries linger, until even Anna can’t quite trust her senses. As she wonders whether Marnie is the product of an under-stimulated imagination, or of severe mental illness, the viewer is encouraged to search for other clues. The supernatural is a damp presence that permeates When Marnie Was There, sinking into the locations, and infecting the mind. The sound of rain thumping against the moldy wooden planks in the eerie, dreadful silo fills the soundtrack until everything around Anna, Marnie and the viewer feels soaked. Possibly in tears.
Studio Ghibli
And yet, as elegiac as When Marnie Was There is, there is an unmistakable sense that this story is only reaching out from the past to hold us tightly. Anna’s increasingly pained midnight meetings with Marnie take on a tragic and abandoned quality, and we see her working through very real emotional issues with the benefit of what may be a ghost, what may be a memory, and what may be a hallucination. Marnie is someone Anna needs, real or figment, and although Hiromasa Yonebayashi never quite answers the question of what is really going on, he does finally answer why, in a series of revelations that are probably unnecessarily detailed, but are as heartfelt and beautiful as anything Studio Ghibli has ever produced.
When Marnie Was There has a magical quality that only the best children’s literature can evoke: the sense that childhood is larger than life and far more mysterious than adults probably remember. This film is a candle in the dark, guiding the viewer with little flickers to our ultimate destination; hopefully fulfillment, but at least a greater understanding. It’s an act of love that could only stem from understanding precisely what it means to feel unloved. A deeply wonderful experience.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
