Miyazaki Madness, Part 7: "Whisper of the Heart" and the joys of creativity
An underrated Ghibli classic written by Miyazaki and directed by Yoshifumi Kondō
On Thursdays, I’m publishing reviews of classic movies, including pieces that have never appeared online before taken from my book 200 Reviews, available now in Paperback or on Kindle (which you should really consider buying, because it’s an awesome collection!). In this series, we are examining the filmography of my all-time favorite movie director - and newly minted two-time Oscar winner with his win for The Boy and the Heron - Hayao Miyazaki! We will be looking at all of his theatrical feature films along with the movies he wrote but did not direct, for a total of 15 weeks of Miyazaki Madness! The series continues today with the 1995 film Whisper of the Heart, which Miyazaki wrote and storyboarded. Enjoy…
Whisper of the Heart
1995, Dir. Yoshifumi Kondō
Composite of excerpts from the book Fade to Lack, published 2013, and my 2014 Honor’s Thesis, Seeing With Eyes Unclouded
Of all the films I’ve seen in my life, few stray as close to my own heart as this simple tale of a teenage girl discovering her artistic drive. In Whisper of the Heart, writer Hayao Miyazaki and director Yoshifumi Kondō craft an experience of immense emotional and thematic complexity, one that resonates so completely with my own worldview and personal history that when watching, I feel as if it were made just for me. Whenever anyone asks for my thoughts on education, romance, depression, creativity, or ambition, I could just refer them to this film, for Miyazaki and Kondō illustrated my feelings better than I ever could.
The core question of the picture is this: How does one actualize oneself within the confines of a world one had no hand in creating? Early on, protagonist Shizuku shares with a friend a set of parody lyrics she created for John Denver’s “Country Roads,” a song that’s crucial throughout the film. “Concrete Roads, everywhere,” she sings. “Cut down all the trees/Filled in the valleys/Western Tokyo, Tama Mountain/My hometown is concrete roads.” It is ostensibly a gag – one both Shizuku and her friend laugh at, and which the male lead of the film, Seiji, will make fun of later – but the lyrics resonate because there is a truth to them, a truth so deeply sublimated within these adolescents that it is easy for them to turn it into comedy. They have grown up in this world of ‘concrete roads,’ of natural settings being eroded by urbanization, of individual identity giving way to vast and imposing social structures, and unlike John Denver pining for the simple comforts of West Virginia, they have never known anything else. This is a world they had no role in forging, and given the rigid social template of contemporary life – school, college, work, etc. – it is unlikely they will have any power to shape it in the future. Even if they did, they would be one of many angling for influence – one dot in that imposing blur of lights that opens the film. How does one exist in such a world and become a self-fulfilled individual at the same time?
It is a natural extension of certain questions Miyazaki had been exploring throughout his career, particularly in 1989’s Kiki’s Delivery Service, but Whisper of the Heart tackles such issues with remarkably direct clarity, all the fantasy that touched or defined the director’s earlier (and later) works absent in this grounded, contemporary portrait of creativity in action. Perhaps Miyazaki felt free to do so when working solely as storyteller, for while he wrote, storyboarded, and produced Whisper of the Heart, directorial duties went to Yoshifumi Kondō, a relatively younger artist who had held prominent positions at the studio going back to Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, and had worked alongside Miyazaki and Takahata in television animation for years before the studio’s founding. Whisper of the Heart would be the first film on which Miyazaki ceded direction to a younger staff member, but it would not be the last, and the integration of complex, contemporary ideas with simple, minimalist narratives would be a common theme of later films with similar production set-ups (namely From Up on Poppy Hill and Arrietty the Borrower). Miyazaki’s intellectual and artistic hand is strongly apparent in these films, and especially in Whisper of the Heart – building clearly from the thematic foundation of Kiki’s Delivery Service, it is a natural evolution in the narrative arc of his career – so while they are not part of his directorial filmography, it is still important to consider them as part of Miyazaki’s overall canon.
That being said, Kondō’s role in the creation of Whisper of the Heart cannot be ignored, for although the storytelling is characteristically Miyazaki from top to bottom, the unique aesthetic dimension and energy Kondō gifts the film makes it one of the brightest, if lesser-known, gems of Ghibli’s catalogue. While Kondō had worked prominently on Miyazaki films before, he primarily worked with Isao Takahata at the studio, supervising animation and serving as character designer on both Grave of the Fireflies and Only Yesterday. Takahata’s films – these two in particular – are rooted in reality and deal with more obviously adult themes than Miyazaki’s works, and since Kondō was one of the primary architects of their visual style, he was a perfect match for Whisper of the Heart, bringing a sharp eye for real-world detail and palpable empathy for everyday emotions, characteristic of Takahata’s work, to Miyazaki’s story.
For instance, Kondō has an incredible eye for how suburban Tokyo settings exist within (or intrude upon, depending on one’s point of view) nature. Trees, grass, and general greenery are simply bursting at the edges of nearly every frame in the film, overwhelming the majority of outdoor shots – where each image is clearly weighted towards the strong, vivid greens, standing out against the muted palettes of human characters and buildings – and even intruding upon indoor spaces. In Shizuku’s school, primarily composed of brown, oaky tones, the greenery still feels prominent whenever a shot includes a window; rather than just animate a few trees outside them (as Miyazaki indicates in the storyboards), Kondō gives the window-framed trees a soft, atmospheric luminescence, our attention drawn to their mysterious glow even indoors. Characters rarely comment on it, but they are surrounded by the natural world; their seeming ignorance of it conveys urban modernity as more of a pathology than a hard, aesthetic truth of the world. The natural environment intrudes always; one need only pay attention to become in touch with it, as Shizuku will as part of her creative awakening in the second half of the film.
Or consider the little details, sprinkled throughout the film, that subtly bring larger issues to light. Shizuku’s family’s apartment is filled with books, for example, and yet her parents and older sister are only ever seen working at the shared laptop. Coupled with the library’s transition to electronic filing at the start of the story (Shizuku prefers the name cards for the personal touch they provide), the intrusion of technology – and its potential for increasing the anonymity of the modern world through further decentralization of human experience – quietly becomes a theme of the picture (it is not insignificant that Shizuku chooses to write her story by hand). Globalization is a major theme from the opening frame onwards, but always in understated ways; the playing of an American country classic over images of metropolitan Japan, for instance, immediately creates a confusion of cultural identity, a notion expressed perhaps even more powerfully in a fleeting shot of a Coke can in the dirt as Shizuku pursues the mysterious cat across town. Recalling the similarly economic use of Coca-Cola imagery as a symbol of American influence in Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949), where Setsuko Hara rides her bike past a prominent Coca-Cola sign on the side of the road, the image – one of the very few in the film without a trace of greenery, speaking to the corruptive nature of what the can represents – helps illustrate a modern Japan in which global influence is capable of overpowering or diluting local character, further compounding the repressive de-individualization of modern life on scales both cultural and personal.
The “Concrete Roads” song Shizuku writes is thus an expression of her life’s repressive qualities. Where John Denver had a natural, unsullied ‘home’ to dream and sing of, an idealized space that probably never existed but nevertheless has a tangible emotional resonance, Shizuku belongs to a generation that arrived after the ‘country roads’ were turned into concrete, when the ‘hometown’ ideal had already given way to the de-personalization of modernity. The mere presence of a hokey American country tune like “Country Roads” in her life demonstrates the sort of anonymous, non-specific transnational atmosphere in which Shizuku has been raised. That Shizuku cannot connect with the original lyrics outright, trying first to translate them straight only to feel they are “trite,” speaks to the difficulty of finding a tangible point of connection – let alone a sense of identity – with modern global culture. This is not a repression Shizuku seems overly conscious of, yet when she chooses to create something, like the original lyrics of “Concrete Roads,” the ideas flow freely into her work.
In this way, the repression of modern life is her starting point in this story. And while Whisper of the Heart, like Kiki’s Delivery Service, is not a narratively rigorous film, it does adhere to a sort of ‘emotional’ three-act structure, wherein Shizuku moves through three distinct phases of attitude and outlook, each signified by the three “Country Roads” adaptations Shizuku writes and shares over the course of the film. Starting with “Concrete Roads” as an expression of her repressive non-direction in life, on to the second “Country Roads” variant embodying her brief but crucial depressive state, and finally to the full adapted version she performs with Seiji and his family – a clear awakening of creative infatuation and drive – this emotional three-act structure is the journey by which Shizuku achieves true self-actualization by the film’s end.
That actualization starts to come into focus in the film’s most remarkable sequence, where Shizuku, having discovered the up-to-now standoffish Seiji is an artisan in his own right, asks the boy to play his violin for her. He demands that she sing with him, and they then launch into a performance of “Country Roads,” with Shizuku providing her own full set of lyrics for the first time. As they begin to play and sing together, Shizuku lighting up with passion and enthusiasm to a degree we have not yet seen, Seiji’s grandfather and several of his friends arrive; hearing Shizuku and Seiji playing below, they quietly come downstairs, grab instruments of their own – standup bass, tambourine, lute, and recorder – and join in. The effect is magnificent. Not only is the animation genuinely breathtaking – even live-action films rarely synchronize the audio and physical motion of instrumental performance this seamlessly, or with such a careful eye for how musicians hold themselves while playing – but there is an all-consuming atmosphere of joy to the sequence, the intoxicating sensation of people coming together to make art, to have fun and express themselves creatively. The impromptu performance happens entirely without words, music acting as a force that draws these people together, that forms a union between them before they ever introduce themselves to one another.
Little wonder, then, that the sequence prompts a genuine creative awakening in Shizuku, as reflected in the third (and first full) set of original lyrics she sings on the spot. Of course, she must have written these words beforehand to have something ready to sing, but even if all the feelings they embody had been buried in her subconscious beforehand, seeping into her writing as they did in the prior two adaptations, they could not have fully meant something to her until this moment, at this crossroads in her life when she feels sad and powerless, and is then, in an instance of pure creative expression, introduced to the profoundly liberating power of artistry for the first time. The moment itself charts a path forward, as do the lyrics:
Had a dream of living on my own
With no fear of being all alone
Pushed my sadness down inside of me
And pretended I was strong as I could be
Country road, this old road
If you go right to the end
Got a feeling it’ll take me
To that town, country road
It doesn’t matter to me how sad I might be
I will never ever let a tear show in my eye
If my feet are moving faster
That’s only because I want to push away memories
Country road, this old road
Could go right to my hometown
I won’t go there, I can’t go there
Can’t go down that country road
Country road, when tomorrow comes
I’ll be like I always am
Want to go back there, can’t go back there
Fare thee well, country road
Where John Denver’s song was the musical epitome of modern conceptions of nostalgia, Shizuku’s is a near-total thematic inverse, reflecting not a perfect, idealized world where one draws strength and comfort from one’s home, but an emotional state in which holding onto one’s past is dangerous and limiting. Shizuku acknowledges all the insecurities and negative feelings we have glimpsed in her so far – the fear of loneliness, the repression of sadness and discomfort – but rather than turn to the ‘country roads’ ideal as a path to healing, she rejects it entirely. “I won’t go there,” she sings of the country road’s potential for taking her ‘home.’ “I can’t go there.” To do so would be to mire herself in complacency, and not actually confront the source of her sadness or anxiety. It is another universal emotional conundrum, a contemplation about being stuck between where one is and where one wants to be, without even really knowing where one’s destination is. In times of stress or uncertainty, who has not longed to return ‘home,’ to retreat into childhood, to stay with what is comfortable or familiar? But one cannot “go back there,” because the only way to find oneself is to move forward and work towards the future – because the idealized ‘home’ Denver sings of no longer exists, if it ever did, and an individual must find what constitutes ‘home’ within oneself. At the song’s end, Shizuku pledges to do just this by bidding the country road farewell – “Sayōnara” in the original Japanese, an even more emphatic goodbye than the translation implies.
In the final scene of the film, Seiji returns from studying his craft in Italy, and he and Shizuku venture up to a high point overlooking the city at dawn, mist blanketing it like the sea before a breathtaking sunrise breaks through the clouds. “I’m glad I pushed myself,” Shizuku declares. “I understand myself better now. I’m going to study hard and go to high school.” It is a lovely denouement to her story, for while we cannot know if Shizuku will be an artist or writer in her future, it is clear in this moment that she will undoubtedly be stronger for having made this effort. Even if she stays more closely within the boundaries of the social template from now on, continuing with high school and college and so forth, she will do so with a better, greater awareness and understanding of who she is, and how she fits into the world around her as an individual, rather than an anonymous, powerless dot in the blur of city lights. By pursuing creativity, she has solved the core conundrum of the film. This may not be the world she chose, or one she had any hand in creating, but she has actualized herself within its boundaries all the same. And on the minor scale Whisper of the Heart operates on, that is a major victory indeed.
That Yoshifumi Kondō died only a few years after the release of Whisper of the Heart – in 1998, at the age of 47, from an aneurism often suspected to be due to overwork – is a tragedy that still haunts Studio Ghibli to this day. Imagine what works he could have produced by now were he still with us, having started from such an absurdly high level as this. His passing also left a lasting impact upon the studio. By the time Whisper of the Heart was released, fans and critics already considered him the obvious heir to the studio, and interviews from the period indicate Miyazaki’s intention to slow the pace of his own work in preparation for a possible retirement. Kondō’s death changed all of that. Suddenly, there was no proven, tested younger staff member who could feasibly direct films in Miyazaki and Takahata’s absence, and for a number of years, that also meant that the studio neglected to produce any of the stirring true-to-life narratives they started making in the 1990s (especially once Takahata moved into a more experimental and stylized phase of his work). Mamoru Hosoda briefly worked with Ghibli as the first director of Howl’s Moving Castle, but felt so creatively stifled that he quickly left, building his own identity with films like The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars before forming Studio Chizu. While Ghibli finally started trusting younger directors with feature films again in the 2010s, most obviously with Hiromasa Yonebayashi, Miyazaki and Takahata’s simultaneous retirements in 2013 mostly signaled the end of the studio’s active creative output – at least until Miyazaki came out of that retirement, once again, for 2023’s The Boy and the Heron. While many who worked at Ghibli have gone on to fruitful careers elsewhere, the company was never truly able to foster a younger generation of animators who would keep the tradition alive within its walls. Kondō was, in many ways, the future of the studio, and it is possible that its potential longevity died with him. The world of cinema is immeasurably poorer for his absence.
NEXT WEEK: Miyazaki returns to the Director’s chair for his biggest film yet - and one of the biggest films ever - Princess Mononoke…
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