There’s something about the way the sun hits the house that serves as its own invitation. Anna’s solitary perambulations lead her to an abandoned villa overlooking the marsh. There in Hokkaido, Anna finds the freedom to explore the area for herself, which of course is one of the great pleasures of a story like this for audiences patient enough to appreciate the change of pace - one that allows us to revel in the hand-painted backgrounds and carefully rendered flora and fauna. She feels disconnected from her peers and, to some extent, from her foster mother, who frets about Anna’s recent fit of asthma attacks, ultimately sending the young girl to spend some time with her adoptive grandparents in Hokkaido, the large island at the northern tip of the crescent-shaped country - an intriguing substitute for the novel’s rustic Norfolk setting.

Timid yet clearly not without talent, Anna spends her free time drawing.

The story centers on a tomboy named Anna (voiced by Sara Takatsuki) who doesn’t have any close friends at school nor can she relate to the pretty and popular girls in her class. Still, ceasing such activity altogether would be a far greater loss, as this latest project plainly demonstrates.īy no means an essential addition to the Ghibli oeuvre, “Marnie” nevertheless represents yet another splendid escape from the increasingly strenuous glut of computer-animated offerings, this one designed to serve as family entertainment after the more adult-skewing likes of “The Wind Rises” and “The Tale of the Princess Kaguya” (and it’s notably the first produced without the involvement of either Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, who directed those two other films, respectively). Following news of Ghibli maestro Hayao Miyazaki’s retirement, this lovely and relatively low-key drama from potential successor Hiromasa Yonebayashi (“The Secret World of Arrietty”) has cast the studio’s own status into question.Ī strong box office showing would have gone a long way to encourage the Ghibli team to keep the pipeline open, but local interest has been disappointingly soft for “Marnie” (whose $31.1 million domestic showing pales compared with the $120-220 million Miyazaki pics earn), and the view from the top seems to be that producing quality hand-drawn animation is too labor-intensive to continue long-term. Robinson’s decidedly British ghost story, a withdrawn teen befriends a mysterious blonde girl who may or may not actually exist. In this demure Japanese adaptation of Joan G. There are no walking houses, magical forest creatures or one-way trains to the spirit world in “When Marnie Was There,” but that doesn’t mean Studio Ghibli’s latest animated feature - and some fear its last - isn’t brimming over with its own unique sense of enchantment.

When marnie was there studio ghibli