Whisper of the Heart
Feb. 25th, 2021 09:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rynlingEarlier this week I realized that my husband has never watched anything from Studio Ghibli. He enjoys movies, but he’s in his forties and comes from a country where there hasn’t been a culture of anime fandom until relatively recently. He really likes the Makoto Shinkai movies we’ve watched, which he calls “documentaries about Japan,” so I thought that Whisper of the Heart would probably be the best Studio Ghibli movie to show him. He loved it.
I loved it too. It’s been about ten years since I last saw it, and I was not expecting it to hit as hard as it did.
Whisper of the Heart is about a middle-school girl named Shizuku who loves reading. Shizuku checks out books from the local library, and she’s noticed that there’s another kid’s name on almost all of the library borrower cards inside the covers of the books she reads. She ends up meeting this boy, who is her age but wants to study the craft of violin making in Italy instead of matriculating to high school. Inspired by his determination to follow his dream, Shizuku decides to follow her own dream of writing a fantasy novel.
Shizuku gets really absorbed in her writing. She tells a friend that she has no appetite because she’s too preoccupied with the novel, and then she eats shortbread cookies so she can stay awake while she’s writing in the evening. She stops hanging out with her friends after school so that she can fantasize about the novel while walking home. She only puts in the bare minimum of work necessary to get by at school, and her grades drop. She gets explosively irritated when people interrupt her while she’s writing. When she’s done with the story, she gets super neurotic about feedback. She cries a lot.
I was just sitting there, like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.”
How dare Hayao Miyazaki come into my house and call me out like this.
I loved it too. It’s been about ten years since I last saw it, and I was not expecting it to hit as hard as it did.
Whisper of the Heart is about a middle-school girl named Shizuku who loves reading. Shizuku checks out books from the local library, and she’s noticed that there’s another kid’s name on almost all of the library borrower cards inside the covers of the books she reads. She ends up meeting this boy, who is her age but wants to study the craft of violin making in Italy instead of matriculating to high school. Inspired by his determination to follow his dream, Shizuku decides to follow her own dream of writing a fantasy novel.
Shizuku gets really absorbed in her writing. She tells a friend that she has no appetite because she’s too preoccupied with the novel, and then she eats shortbread cookies so she can stay awake while she’s writing in the evening. She stops hanging out with her friends after school so that she can fantasize about the novel while walking home. She only puts in the bare minimum of work necessary to get by at school, and her grades drop. She gets explosively irritated when people interrupt her while she’s writing. When she’s done with the story, she gets super neurotic about feedback. She cries a lot.
I was just sitting there, like, “Oh my god. Oh my god. Oh my god.”
How dare Hayao Miyazaki come into my house and call me out like this.
