Heidi in the Mountains

A Japanese animated film set in the Swiss Alps. Heidi is five. Her parents are dead and her aunt has been looking after her. The woman is going to Frankfurt to work. She leaves the child with her grandfather. He lives on the mountain. Above the village, alone in a hut. He talks to nobody. The villagers are wary of him and he does not go to church. He does not want Heidi. She stays anyway. From there the film takes place on the mountain. Heidi settles in. She sleeps in hay, drinks goat's milk, and watches the stars through a window. She makes a friend. Peter herds the goats. The goats have names. She knows each one. Peter's grandmother is blind. Heidi goes to her and talks to her. The grandfather softens. He makes the girl a chair, then a bed. What the narrative is interested in is not nature but acceptance: its idea is that the old man wants nobody, and that a child changes it without noticing. The seasons pass. The snow comes and then goes. The narrative builds no incident. It shows how a day passes: waking, taking out the goats, bread, cheese and evening. That is deliberate. The narrative values the ordinary. The structure is a compilation. The first episodes of a television series were joined for cinema. The series was broadcast in 1974 and ran fifty-two episodes. Isao Takahata directed, Hayao Miyazaki did the scene layout, and Yoichi Kotabe the character design. The team went to Switzerland before production. They studied the landscape, the houses, the goats and the vegetation, which was unusual in Japanese animation at the time. The backgrounds came from that. The source is Johanna Spyri's novel. The series was very popular in Japan and later in Europe. Kazuko Sugiyama, Noriko Ohara and Kohei Miyauchi are in the voice cast. Who it is for: anyone who likes children's animation and quiet narrative. Who it is not for: anyone who has seen the series; the film adds nothing and some sections sit awkwardly because of the compression.