And when we compare it to Spirited Away, we will see that it lacks the scope of ideas and symbolic imagery to project and better articulate the quietly speaking voice of the central conflicts. If we then compare When Marnie Was There to Grave Of The Fireflies, it pales significantly due to its inability to show the complex humanity in characters via their struggles. What's more, its imagery is not powerful enough to enhance the voice of conflict. When Marnie Was There does not have the detail, specificity, structure or tone to do this. This is why the audience has to be brought closer to the characters that house them: so we can hear what these conflicts are trying to say. Conflicts such as loneliness and abandonment can appear far more trivial than these dire conflicts and so their voice is correspondingly quieter. Significant emotional and physical conflicts, for example, someone is about to die, or has just had someone they love die, call out to the audience very loudly. And in this sense, conflicts all have a voice that calls out for attention and empathy. This isn't necessarily because of the themes alone, but because accessing the true depth and conflict within these themes requires storytellers to bring us quite close to characters. ![]() ![]() These are difficult themes to work with because they can so often characterise a protagonist as merely weak. When Marnie Was There is trying to be about loneliness, isolation and abandonment. They briefly form a pseudo homosexual and oedipal relationship characterised by no real conflict, only reveals of a backstory that are completely uninteresting by virtue of the fact that the present it is truing to deepen isn't interesting in the first place. ![]() This is then essentially about a lonely girl who discovers that she has a rich grandmother who was also lonely as a child. ![]() When Marnie Was There fails where all of these films succeed precisely because it is wrapped up in a mundane melodrama. It is then very easy to see Spirited Away in the importance given to the tides, which play a role as the dividing substance between the real and the unreal and so come to represent a character's subconscious The Tale of Princess Kaguya is in the imagery of the moon, which implies an off-world magnetism that draws our character along her journey The Wind Rises is seemingly visually quoted with so many shots of hills, sky and water and Only Yesterday is in the thematic exploration of memory and home. The best elements of When Marnie Was There, elements of the aesthetic and details of world and character building are all highly derivative of other Ghibli works without matching any of them. When Marnie Was There is a mundane anime melodrama built upon petty foundations and told via bland characters and poor plot strands that are opened and closed in an amateur manner. Though this is recognised as not the best Ghibli work by many, it has received much praised - praise that I don't think it deserves. In all hope, Miyazaki will come out of retirement yet again as he has implied he will because this is not a film that should bookend Ghibli's filmography, simply for the fact that it is not very good. When Marnie Was There is Studio Ghibli's film last film.
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