Why “Whisper of the Heart” is My Favorite Studio Ghibli Film
Studio Ghibli provides some of the most imaginative stories and lush worlds we have in film. I’ve seen every Studio Ghibli films at least once, and a few multiple times. Each one has its own unique beauty and though I wouldn’t argue that it is the best Studio Ghibli film (I’d argue that title goes to either Spirit Away or Princess Mononoke), Whisper of the Heart is my personal favorite.
Directed by Yoshifumi Kondō, the film was based on the manga Mimi o Sumaseba which was originally created by Aoi Hiiragi and is the first Studio Ghibli film not directed by Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata.
Whisper of the Heart follows a girl in junior high named Shizuku Tsukishima. She’s a creative girl who rather write songs or reads fairytales instead studying for high school entrance exams. One day she notices that a mystery guy keeps checking out all the same library books as her. Her curiosity eventually leads her to that person, Seiji Amasawa, a musically gifted boy who wants to chase his dreams of being an expert violin maker.
She calls him a jerk when he teases her, but with him routinely on her mind, we can see infatuation blooming in her heart (even if she tries to fight it at first). Seiji later reveals that he checked out the same books as her to get her attention, yet the timing is bad—at the time Shizuku finds out that the boy she likes likes her back, she learns he’s going to do an apprenticeship in Italy for two months and may be their longer if successful. Shizuku doesn’t feel good enough for Seiji (since he already knows what he wants to do with his life and she “wastes” her time reading books), so in order to prove her worthiness to herself, she decides to write a novel — turning a cat figurine named “The Baron” into to a real life character in a fairytale romance.
The two junior high schoolers, through both happenstance and intention, spend more time together and eventually reciprocate each other’s feelings. They both decide to stay in the moment, enjoying the time they have together instead of overly concentrating on the future. It’s a beautiful story and as cliché as it is to say, I have to admit that Whisper of the Heart makes me nostalgic for my younger days.
At that age, I loved reading novels, often choosing them over studying for my classes. Though I didn’t know for sure what I wanted to do like Seiji did, writing felt like home for me and I had the sense that no matter what I did, I wanted to write a book. When I was around twelve, I started writing my first novel—a convoluted epic quest where figures from different mythologies banded together to stop an evil god bent on destroying the world. Though not related to romance, one of my first heartbreaks was when my story got deleted when my computer hard-drive burned out and my father deleted the only other copy from his desktop.
When comes to young love, I was about as awkward around girls as most boys at that age, but my awkwardness more so resulted from unease in a society that teaches boys to have “game” to persuade girls to do something sexual as opposed to pursuing a genuine romantic connection (though I obviously couldn’t articulate that in junior high). From a kiss to losing your virginity, I couldn’t fathom how or why romance and physical intimacy (love and sex, to be more blunt) were bifurcated. It didn’t just compute, which made courtship feel unauthentic, even manipulative. I was too in my head, it was hard to get out of it. But all in all, I thought romance was more or less suppose to feel like Shizuku and Seiji.
What I love about Studio Ghibli films and Whisper of the Heart specifically is they take the internal emotions of young people seriously. They validate experiences like mine. Young love often gets described with slightly pejorative words and phrases — naive, puppy love, immature, innocent, etc. The wisdom that comes with age can make our youthful infatuations seem fleeting, but I think hindsight can make us forget that our feelings at thirteen were just as valid as they are at thirty. Though nostalgia can be misleading, it dives into the real feelings we experienced in moments of the past. We aren’t guaranteed to experience butterflies in our stomach in the present, but we can find them fluttering in our memories.
The type of romanticism we trivialize when it comes from young people is the same romance we yearn for as adults, especially in lives mostly defined by work, child-rearing or both. There is a youthful romance in the foreground of Whisper of the Heart, but we see Shizuku’s parents go through the motions of their work-life. They are caring and empathetic towards their two daughters, but we don’t see any intimacy between them. Ironically, the viewer’s gaze is adolescent—in the sense that what we are made to concentrate on is the young love, not the older, “mature” one.
To be fair though, when I watch Whisper of the Heart, I do get a sense of nostalgia that isn’t all positive per se. It reminds me of my youth and the wonderful yet suffocating feel of having a crush on someone. You feel high in the sky, so high that you can’t breathe. Yet the vast majority of us didn’t have a fairytale romance at that age. Our first kisses were likely more awkward than magical, our first crush probably liked someone else and finding our special someone came much later in life. Most of us probably would relate more to the character Yuko, Shizuku’s best friend who has a crush on a boy who has a crush on Shizuku. And like Shizuku, we probably were (and still are) oblivious to most of those who had crushes onus. Ironically, in both a comedic and tragic sense, there are likely several Yukos in your life and you don’t even know it.
This is why I think the flip-side of nostalgia is a kind of melancholy. Yale professor John Durham Peters defined nostalgia as “the jealousy the present has for the past.” Both wishful and wistful, nostalgia awakens the longing in us. It’s a feeling that conjures the would-of-should-of-could-of in our lives. You could be a 50-year-old with kids out of college, but if your high school crush admitted that they had a crush on you too, imagine all the what-ifs that would be bouncing around your head. In that since, nostalgia can leave us stuck wondering about a moment long after it has passed; unable to relinquish memories, even cherished ones, that we should let go.
Maybe that emotional push and pull is why I enjoy Whisper of the Heart. The endearing tale of young romance stirs up complex emotions that become rarer in our daily lives, whether we are focused on our careers or making sure all of the household logistics are attended to. Studio Ghibli films are great at capturing the essence of what it feels like to be young without trivializing the thoughts, desires and concerns of young people.
And I think Whisper of the Heart does this the best, which is why it’s my favorite.
