old fairy tale 30 years later
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In Russia, the animated film “Whisper of the Heart” by Yoshifumi Kondo, filmed almost 30 years ago according to the script by Hayao Miyazaki, is being re-released – a hand-drawn story of a girl who loved books.
Studio Ghibli, founded by Miyazaki, has Totoro on its logo, but in Whisper of the Heart the director is not the great Miyazaki himself. He is only a co-writer here. The world into which we will now be let in is both his and not his. The director is Yoshifumi Kondo, and special attention goes to the artist who painted the landscapes in which the action takes place. This is Inoue Naohisa, and his specialty, one might say, is the invention of new worlds.
Or rather, not even that. He came up with his own world – Iblard, and has been drawing it all his life. He’s trying to show us (we have to want to see). Iblard is somewhere next to the landscapes of the impressionists (Inoue Naohisa is also called an impressionist), somewhere next to the usual scenery of Japanese cartoons, but its own, special. Not the past and not the future, just a beautiful Nowhere. Strange castles, funny houses, alien vegetation, mountains with rings around them, like planets. The mountains also seem to be alive, they also grow like special giant trees. Iblard became the backdrop for the events taking place in Whisper of the Heart.
Yes, it’s more correct to talk about events rather than plot. Schoolgirl Shizuku Tsukushima reads books in the school library. She is on the threshold: high school, college ahead, adulthood. But this is all behind the scenes for now. There are marks in the books indicating that some Seiji Amasawa had already read them before Shizuku. Any book that interests Shizuka has already passed through Seiji’s hands. Who is this Seiji?
The little heroine not only reads, she also writes. He writes a fantasy story where the main character is the cat Baron. A cat figurine was found in an antique shop. The cat is in a tailcoat, and the grandson of the antique dealer is Seiji. This story, like all human history, is made of books.
The announcement genre requires intrigue. Will Shizuku and Seiji be able to meet? Will the Baron live? But there is no intrigue – contrary to the inevitable expectation of the viewer, this is not a fairy tale. The teenagers will meet, but will not fall into the fantasy story that Shizuku is writing. The cat will remain a statue (although there is a living and incredibly cute cat in the film too). They will tell us not about miracles, but about how first love grows out of teenage clumsiness and timidity, about how difficult it is to build relationships with the adult world, about children and parents… The literal translation of the title is “If you listen.” And if you listen to the film, you will hear yourself.
Miyazaki’s genius is his ability to turn the viewer into a child. At least, that’s exactly what it seems to me. The plots of his main films seem to be quite simple, but the inviolable unity of story and picture disarms you. You stop being an adult, you stop being sophisticated, you stop demanding something from a fairy tale, you just live in it. Children have special eyes, not the same as those of adults, and now a Japanese master gives you back your children’s eyes for a short time. Miracle is always around, but as you grow older you lose the ability to see it. And Miyazaki reminds: it’s in you, this skill, it hasn’t gone away, just remember how it’s done. And you remember because he is a master.
This is how worlds are created
So, having created them, often
Leave it to spin
Wasting gifts.
In “Whisper” everything is different, because a teenager is no longer quite a child, it seems easier for the viewer to find himself once again a teenager – the road from his current self to his teenage self is shorter, but on the other hand, complete dissolution in bygone times seems impossible . I suspect because a modern person never truly ceases to be a teenager. The fourteen-year-old is locked in anyone, and he is alive, but he will not escape from under the grown adult. Looking at the heroes of “Whisper”, you think, of course, about yourself, that everything was great, but it didn’t go quite as we would like, not quite as it was expected, this is not a fairy tale, this is actually something It’s all irreparable now. Therefore, there is a small amount of bitterness in the aftertaste.
And – this is already a step away from the film – a little more about bitterness and a little about return. The film is old, classic, 1995. There was also a premiere in Russia, albeit belatedly, in 2009. That is, this is not an acquaintance (although for some it may be an acquaintance, we will envy them), it is a meeting with an old friend. And here something like a flashback happens to a person who managed to catch the Union.
This was already the case in childhood – Soviet film distribution had its own quirks, a film could return to the cinema several years after the premiere, and you would return to it too, go to the cinema, warming a coin in your pocket, wink at the heroes as if they were old acquaintances… And later It happened when video stores opened, where they showed, without really understanding the quality, everything that we, for obvious historical reasons, had missed – from real classics to second-rate action films. Or no, it’s not fair, we need to start listing just with second-rate action films, they were the ones who captured the imagination and were in demand in the first place, Rambo was more important than all the other heroes, and we looked with clear, inexperienced eyes at the endless stream of explosions and shootouts, so that later argue about who collects whom: Van Damme Chuck Norris or Chuck Norris Van Damme? It happened that they even fought. The question is important. The answer was worth a broken nose.
The return to the screens of films that have already been here (I’m looking at the current posters of fashionable cinemas – “Only Lovers Left Alive”, “Ponyo the Fish on the Cliff” – you see, we’ll live to see “Arrival of the Train”, time goes back!), sets some new perspective. A strategy of escape to Nowhere, relocation to Nowhere, a situation in which modernity, defined including by film premieres, ceases to matter. A special map on which the dots are not what is new, but what we managed to get to.
As in childhood. Children, psychologists say, generally do not like new things very much and are ready to review hundreds of times what they have already seen.
“Whisper of the Heart” is not the worst option for a stopover for such a trip. But here, of course, you need to listen.
In theaters from March 7
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