Whisper of the Heart

Whisper of the Heart (1995) is about a schoolgirl who loves reading working out what she wants to do. Shizuku keeps seeing the same name on the card in every library book she borrows: Seiji Amasawa. She wonders who he is. Then she follows a cat to an antique shop and meets him there. He wants to make violins and is planning to go to Italy. Beside him she feels empty. To prove she can do something too, she decides to write a novel. The real subject is talent in its raw state. What she writes is not good, and the old man in the shop explains it with a fine analogy: raw stone looks beautiful, but getting the jewel out of it takes a long time of cutting. It is a Studio Ghibli production. Miyazaki wrote the screenplay but did not direct. The director was Yoshifumi Kondō. He had worked as an animation director at Ghibli for years and the studio saw him as the one who would follow Miyazaki and Takahata; this was prepared as his first feature. It was his only one. Kondō died of an aneurysm in 1998 at forty seven. His death started an argument about the intensity of work at the studio, and Ghibli's management planning changed afterwards. The antique shop and the cat figure inside it later became a film of their own, The Cat Returns. A song sequence is the best known moment; she sings and he plays the violin. It runs 111 minutes. Good for: Ghibli, coming of age, and quiet animation. Less good for: the plot is very calm and there is almost no fantasy element.