But then one day she meets Marnie, a girl who wears old fashioned clothes and lives in a stately European-looking house across the lake.

It doesn’t, and soon Anna is more isolated than ever, surrounded by strangers who are even more pushy than the city-folk about not giving her room to breathe (so to speak).

The fact that she suffers from some sort of asthma-like condition that triggers in response to stress doesn’t help matters.Īnna’s foster mother sends her off to stay with family friends in a rural part of Hokkaido for the Summer, in the well-meaning but deluded hope that this will help alleviate both issues. Her peers are all making friends and having their first crushes while Anna is left on the outside of the social circle, hiding behind a sullen mask. That would be a difficult reputation for any movie to shoulder, but it’s especially unfortunate for one that’s as quiet, unambitious and unexpected as When Marnie Was There is.īased off a British novel of the same name from the 60s (one that Miyazaki put on his list of top 50 children’s books, which probably explains why Ghibli decided to turn it into a movie), WMWT tells the story of Anna, an introverted and troubled eleven year old girl living in Tokyo. Then the plug was pulled, putting Yonebeyashi (who has since left the studio alongside the other Ghibli animation staff) in the unenviable position of having possibly directed Ghibli’s last movie. People were looking forward to Ghibli’s future, a future that seemed to include younger upstarts like Hiromasa Yonebeyashi, who directed Arrietty a few years earlier. Studio founders Isao Takahata and Hayao Miyazaki had both just retired. There had been rumblings for a while of financial trouble- they were pretty much the last studio to retain a full salaried staff working exclusively in Japan, both of which are incredibly expensive- but the news still came as a shock to many.

Their future is still up in the air, but the upshot is that they currently aren’t producing any films.

If you’re clued into the anime-o-sphere you probably noticed that Studio Ghibli went through a bit of a rough patch last year. Hot damn will you look at the typography on that poster

When marnie was there scene