echo Whisper Of The Heart is a 1995 animated film from the good folks over at Studio Ghibli. It was directed by Yoshifumi Kondo as his first and tragically last feature film. Set in a sleepy suburb of Tokyo, the film has no flying witches, blonde-haired wizards, or cities of spirits. It’s a cosy, grounded story about a girl who meets a boy. It’s a movie in which long, luxurious minutes are spent exploring the sleepy backstreets of suburban Japan, a film in which you can lose yourself in a scene of a high school girl following a cat through a quiet neighbourhood.
The film has a reputation in that chill middle ground between Ghibli’s most well-known and lauded works– Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and perhaps My Neighbour Totoro– and their lesser known projects, like the wacky environmentalist epic Pom Poko, or the watercolour-styled, comedic slice-of-life shenanigans of My Neighbours The Yamadas. It’s carved out a nice niche for itself within the Ghibli catalogue, not overwhelmingly popular but not overlooked either.
It is also– among other things– a delightful little movie that you should give a watch if you haven’t already.
But aside from being an enjoyable, well-crafted experience, Whisper Of The Heart struck me on my first viewing as a unique one. It conveyed a message I hadn’t seen often in media, and especially movies. It showed me a story that felt much like a reflection of many young artists’ experiences, fumbling but full of passion. It was bright and breezy but never spoke condescendingly to its audience, discussing topics like art and passion and planning for the future with empathy and understanding.
To explain what I mean by all that, we’ll have to cover the film in a little more depth.
(Warning: Spoilers for basically the entire emotional core of the movie will follow. Continue at your own discretion.)
The film’s protagonist, Shizuku Tsukishima, is a junior high school student living in the suburbs of Tokyo. She likes reading, writing, and playing music. During the film’s relatively chill first act, her only goal is to complete the lyrics to a song she’s been tinkering with, based on the melody of John Denver’s Country Roads. She spends her days like many 14 year-olds do. She eats school lunches with her friends, explores the curious corners and backstreets of her town on the weekends, and indulges in idle daydreams about a future she hasn’t given much serious thought to yet.
The plot of the film properly starts on one relaxed, unremarkable evening, when Shizuku finds that the library books she’s checking out have each been checked out before by one person, one Seiji Amasawa. She doesn’t know who the guy is, but he must be attending the same high school, to have borrowed the books . So she thinks about it idly over the next few days, chipping away at the pile of books she’s borrowed while sitting conspicuously at a table in the library, on the off-chance that this Seiji will make themself known to her.
This stage of the film is relaxed, more focused on sketching out a beautiful picture of suburban life in Tokyo than fretting about progressing the plot. Shizuku keeps working on her song on park benches and in her home, goes on errands, wanders the city as aimlessly as she does her life.
Two things happen along the way.
The first happens at school, where Shizuku’s left her lyric-filled notebook behind after a conversation with a friend. She hurries back to it and finds someone else already got to it first– a boy who looks roughly her age, flipping through the book as if he’d just checked it out of the library. You can imagine the sort of meet-cute that happens here. She gets embarrassed and yells at him and he plays it off nonchalantly, a perfectly aloof dark-haired stranger. He teases her then bids her farewell, using her name– which he of course saw beside her lyrics– and leaves without giving his own.
The second event starts with a cat– sitting on the seat of a train, prim and proper as though it belongs there. Shizuku sees it waltz into the train car and leap up onto the seat. Because she’s a teenager with a lot of time on her hands, she of course chooses to follow it. She wonders aloud about the cat’s destination as it gets off at its desired stop. She has a one-sided conversation with it as it prowls through a cosy hilltop neighbourhood, passing barking dogs and quiet backstreets.
She winds up at an antiques shop, up near the top of the hill. The cat vanishes into the dark wood storefront. Shizuku follows, of course, proclaiming that she’s lucky to have found ‘a place where stories begin’. Within, the store holds many items for sale. Cuckoo and grandfather clocks, antique furniture, all sorts of odds and ends. It is indeed a strange and lovely place, and Shizuku finds herself drawn to a strange and lovely artefact– a porcelain statue of an anthropomorphic cat, standing on two legs and dressed in a dapper suit, green feline eyes shining with mystery.
The store’s owner finds her and breaks the spell of wide-eyed wonder. He’s a kindly elderly man, and a mirthful conversationalist, but he has to send Shizuku home. Her little excursion has eaten away at the hours and night is falling. She’ll be back soon, though.
A couple days later, she keeps her promise. She traces the path the cat had shown her and makes her way back to the store, just in time to meet someone unexpected.
Seiji Amasawa, in a reveal so obvious it’s nearly impossible to not see it coming, turns out to be the boy Shizuku’d met that day at the park bench. Shizuku asks him why on Earth he’d be there, at that specific antiques shop, and he dances around the answer.
The conversation the two have is, like their initial meeting, a painfully realistic one. The film is grounded, and the dialogue between its characters is filled with all the little pauses and awkward beats you’d expect of two teenagers who barely know each other. Still, there’s a rich charm in how well the characters’ expressions and emotions are captured. You feel like you’re watching real people, not just characters within a contrived plot.
Eventually, Shizuku and Seiji’s conversation leads them inside the shop. Seiji has already seen a private part of Shizuku in the form of her song lyrics, and feels that he should return the favour. He leads her down into the bowels of the shop, where a workshop lies. It’s a general woodworking area but Seiji uses it for a specific purpose, that being the carving of violins.
Seiji is an artist, too. One who puts as much stock into creating the instrument of expression as much as playing it. Shizuku, impressed, asks him to play for her. He denies the request, stating that he doesn’t play that well, and anyway his main goal is to be the maker of violins, not a player of them. Half a dozen of his previous attempts at carving hang on the wall beside them as he speaks.
He’s not good enough, he says. His father’ll never allow him to go off to Italy and learn the trade with the master craftsmen at this rate. He pours his heart out. He tells Shizuku about his worries for the future, worries borne from weighing the flame of his passion against the reality of parental expectations. He probably won’t get to carve violins for a living. All this practice, all this spent effort might be for nothing.
Shizuku doesn’t have the answers for him. She’s taken aback, in truth. Struck by the conviction of his words, awed by the passion behind them. She hasn’t thought nearly as much about her future as he has. His words plant a seed of self-reflection within her.
She puts that aside for later, though. Seiji, having spilled his worries out, offers to play for her on one condition. She has to sing along with his playing. She can use the prototype lyrics to her Country Roads interpretation, he’ll follow along, he says. After a beat, she agrees.
The scene that follows is the one where I realised I was watching something special.
Many movies about musicians show us grand performances. We’re shown moments of inspiration, sessions of furious rehearsal, displays of hard-won skill on big stages. Less common is a film about lower-skilled artists.
When Shizuku and Seiji perform together, they don’t do it in front of a huge crowd. It is not a moment of artistic apotheosis. It’s clear to see that they’re both amateurs, playing to each other in the basement of an empty workshop. They synchronise well, but with effort.
What spoke to me was the energy of the scene.
It is the condensed, beautiful moment of two people harmonising in a language more eloquent than simple Japanese. It showed connection through music in a way that wasn’t seamless, but which communicated so much more than simple words could. It wasn’t the simple magnetic force of romance, pulling two people together in an almost inevitable way, but a conversation between two artists who let their music speak for themselves. Shizuku sings her song, and Seiji plays along to the words. This is who I am, she says without saying the words at all. This is who I am, Seiji echoes.
It is a spellbinding little scene, as beautiful as it is wordless. (I should note here that although the rest of the film is in Japanese, Shizuku sings and songwrites in English, so her recited lyrics don’t really count as spoken dialogue). As someone who wasn’t and still isn’t a musician, I was transfixed by the joy and passion communicated by the scene.
As the song progresses, two men enter the store above. Drawn by the sound of the jam session, the kindly shop-owner and his friend descend the stairs to the woodworking room and wordless join in, surprised but delighted. Shizuku’s voice and Seiji’s violin are joined by two other instruments, the music gaining more dimensions.
Eventually, it ends.
Shizuku’s song draws to a close. Seiji lowers his violin, and the two men congratulate both of them on their musicianship. It’s revealed that the shop-owner is Seiji’s grandfather, and he relays some important news to him after some small talk with the two teenagers: Seiji’s father has agreed to send him overseas for training. But– and this is important– this is a trial run only. Seiji will spend two months in Italy studying under the craftsmen there, and will only be allowed to pursue a full education if the craftsmen deem him worthy.
Later on, after she hitches a ride home on Seiji’s bike, Shizuku lies in bed and thinks about her future.
Her mind is a whirlwind after properly meeting Seiji. The jam session, the passion in Seiji’s words as he spoke about his goals, his shy admittance that he admired her taste in books and skill in lyricism, all of it soaks into her mind and leaves her with many questions.
She likes Seiji, but does she deserve him? Seeing how driven he was has made her consider her own convictions. She hasn’t thought much about what she’ll do after high school, hasn’t thought much at all beyond the short-term goal of completing her song. They’re not together, but if she wants to be, then surely she should get her act together. She should do something with her time, put all her listless energy into something concrete.
It’s arbitrary, and probably dumb, but she decides that she’ll write a book.
So much of her time and so much of her and Seiji’s connection has been through books, after all. She’d won writing prizes in middle school as a kid and still enjoys writing. It’s one of the things in life which she’s both good and passionate at. It may not be her future career, but it’s something to focus on for now.
It’s important to note that she doesn’t come to this decision out of love. Her affection for Seiji is a part of it, but this is for more than him. Seeing the passion he showed for his artform has spurred her into wanting to better hers. This is for her, in the end. Shizuku wants to write a book to find out if she can. She wants to know if she’s good enough, to discover if the flames of creativity shine as brightly in her as it does in Seiji.
With that decision made, the film shifts gears dramatically.
Seiji leaves for Italy, promising to get back in touch once he returns, and Shizuku gets to work. From this point on, the film’s previously relaxed pace quickens, tightening with focus, seemingly imbued with the same determination Shizuku finds in herself as she works on her book. The cosy slices of suburban life drop away from the film as Shizuku gains a driving purpose.
She throws herself at the task with eagerness. She borrows books from the school library to research European myths and fairy tales to draw ideas from, checks out non-fiction books on landscapes for research, and picks a central inspiration to base the book around. The mysterious cat statue dressed in the white suit will be the main character of her story, Shizuku decides. She brainstorms and reads and writes with a fervour I was shocked to see represented on screen. The viewer is treated to lavishly animated brainstorming sessions, in which the characterised antique store cat whisks Shizuku away on whimsical adventures.
This section of the film– this flurry of artistic fervour, this energising moment of creative productivity– holds that unique feeling I mentioned at the top of this article.
Whisper Of The Heart presents far more than just a charming romance between two teenagers. It’s a film about young artists, about connecting with other creatives in a mutually energising way. Shizuku does go on to finish her song, and her book, but I find it’s that initial moment of sparked determination that lingers most in my mind. The film shows its audience the joy of meeting someone who spurs you on in your own creative journey. It conveys the pleasure of finding a creative direction in your life, and committing to it wholeheartedly. It’s filled with shining moments of sentimentality and fantastic representations of artistic passion, and I love it dearly.
Another film I love dearly is Kiki’s Delivery Service.
Released six years before Whisper Of The Heart, Kiki’s Delivery Service is a 1989 fantasy film directed by the man himself, Hayao Miyazaki. Unlike Whisper Of The Heart, it takes place in a world disconnected from our own. It’s gone to be an incredibly iconic part of the Ghibli catalogue, sharing roughly equal pop cultural recognisability with the likes of Totoro. I’m sure you’ve Kiki, with her red bow and her black cat before. Like Totoro, it’s nearly essential viewing for anyone who enjoys a) animated films, b) cosy movies, and c) cosy animated films.
All that considered, the likelihood of you already having seen the film before is pretty high, so I won’t go through it in the beat-by-beat manner I did for Whisper Of The Heart.
But, just for fun, let us paint the first half of the film in broad strokes.
Kiki’s world is populated by witches, who as a coming-of-age trial each embark on a year of living abroad as independent practitioners of magic, using their knowledge of said magic to help out whichever local community they choose to embed themselves in for the duration of their year away from home. Kiki is one such witch. We meet her a little while after her 13th birthday, bidding farewell to her parents and setting off on her journey with a bag of belongings, her mother’s flying broomstick, and her black cat Jiji.
The opening portion of the film is pure joy. The exhilaration and sensory delight of flight is something Hayao Miyazaki is very adept at capturing, and he puts that knowledge to good use here. As Kiki flies from her hometown above treetops and rolling green hills, you feel her enjoyment. This is key not only in that it makes the movie fun to watch, but in that it reinforces the thematic core of the movie later.
Because as Kiki touches down in the gorgeous seaside town of Koriko– which, fun fact, was modelled pretty closely off of the German town of Stockholm– she remembers that she’ll have to pick a trade. She left home with an allowance, but she’s alone in what feels to her like a big city, teeming with people and vehicles and noise and activity. She needs a place to stay, and needs to figure out what to do to earn her keep. Her mother was good at potions, but she doesn’t share that same interest, or the skills for it.
Fortunately for her, the answer to both those pressing questions turns up when she arrives at a bakery run by a kindly married couple. After she aids the shop-owner, Osono, in returning a customer’s item to them across town quickly with the aid of her broomstick, Osono and her husband Fukuo lend her a spare room to stay in as she figures out what she wants to do. With a roof under her head and her immediate needs settled for the time being, Kiki gets to thinking, and ends up concluding that she should do something she loves as her job.
She’s going to start a flying delivery service.
I’m sure you know much of the rest from there. Shenanigans and fun antics follow. Although the town of Koriko is a fictional place, it feels exceedingly well-established, and the viewer gets to see many angles and aspects of it as Kiki explores the area and makes her delivery runs, settling into the rhythm of town life. She meets new friends in the form of a young, flight-obsessed rich kid and a kindly grandmother who loves baking pies. She gets into altercations with a flock of forest crows and meets a solitary artist living in a secluded cabin in said woods. She flies with skill and joy, and seems to enjoy balancing her labour with her passion.
But then the festivities slow to a halt, and the movie’s focus shifts inward.
After a series of shenanigans involving inconvenient rain, late clocks, and a delicious home-baked pie, Kiki ends up at the doorstep of her latest delivery recipient. It’s been raining heavily, and she’s drenched and shivering. She’s worked so hard, first to bake the pie for her client’s granddaughter whose door she now stands outside, and then to keep the pie warm and dry on the way to the grandkid’s house. She knocks on the door, aware with every passing second of the fact that she’s too late to attend the aviation event her new town friend has invited her to. She’s learning one of the difficulties of working life, the random schedule of her job preventing her from connecting with people. Then the door opens and she’s treated to another harsh reality of the job she’s chosen.
The kindly grandmother’s granddaughter looks haughty and ungrateful, greeting her tersely on the evening of her birthday. Kiki blinks at her brusqueness, explains the situation to the kid, who looks so close to her own age. Your grandma worked so hard on baking this pie for you, she says, proffering the delicacy she’d protected from the downpour and howling winds. The kid looks at Kiki, sopping wet and dripping onto the marble porch, looks down at the pie, then grabs it with a groan and an eye-roll. I don’t even like these dumb pies, she says, then shuts the door without offering a word of thanks to Kiki.
The young witch is left standing there, soaked and alone in the rain, too late and too exhausted to attend the function her new friend has invited her to. It’s the evening now, and getting later by the second. She should just get home and sleep. What words are there for a job that ends like that one? She makes her way back to her dusty old room behind the bakery, changes into not-sodden clothes, falls into bed, and promptly goes to sleep.
From this moment on, the film is a much more melancholy experience. Kiki is left depleted in both body and spirit after the incident. She has to be nursed slowly back to health by Osono after contracting a cold for all her troubles, and in the days after her recovery her delivery service hits a dry spell. No packages come in, and she spends her days listlessly helping Osono and her husband at the counter of the bakery. She gets calls from her town friend, Tombo, and ignores them. She doesn’t look at her broomstick for days, rooted to the ground and the grind of life.
In a heartbreaking little scene, Kiki discovers something terrible: she can no longer talk to her cat. (Sorry for not mentioning this earlier, but yes. Jiji talks. Witches talk to their cats in this world.) Jiji, Kiki’s lifelong companion, is no longer intelligible to her. And worst of all amid all this dreariness is a startling loss– Kiki has lost her ability to fly! This is the cherry on top of a sundae of misfortune, and it sends her into a further spiral of doubt.
Although Kiki isn’t literally an artist, it’s hard not to draw parallels between her work as a flying delivery-person and the struggles of a working artist. Kiki’s clients come in sporadically for a service that can’t be classified as a necessity, and ask for a specialised service only Kiki can provide. Her ability of flight is a passion and less of a science than an art, subject to moods and whims. She loses her ability to fly in the same way Artist’s Block can strip the free-flowing instinct away from a painter. Her dejectedness in these scenes feels painfully accurate to my own experiences with writer’s block and the like.
Strip away the fantastical elements and it’s not hard to see Kiki’s story as one of a young artist struggling to make it on her own in an unfamiliar city. She’s treated with scepticism by some clients and excitement by a few others. She’s a novelty, and although we as the audience never see her comment on that, I think that fact does wound her somewhat.
This is what being an artist is sometimes, the film argues. You’ll work your ass off just to deliver a product that your rude client doesn’t even appreciate, overclock your body and forsake fun outings with friends just to meet a deadline. The work is fun at times– of course it is, you picked it because it’s your passion– but punishing at others. You’ll lead a different life than your peers, and have to reckon with that in your own way.
Throughout the rest of the film leading up to Kiki’s creative crisis, hints of harsh reality had already been dropped. There’s a wordless scene early on of Kiki buying groceries, having the intensely relatable experience of shopping for oneself for the first time and marvelling at the price of basic necessities and food. After she leaves the store, she passes a group of fashionable girls on the street, and then finds her eyes drawn to a display window emphasising a beautiful pair of red shoes. You see the desire and conflict in her eyes for a moment as she eyes the shoes. Then she looks away, and walks back to her room with her groceries.
In her room behind the bakery, she makes for herself simple pancakes which she eats for breakfast and dinner without honey or syrup. She keeps some eggs and bread on the one little table in the middle of her room. It isn’t a bad place. Certainly, she can’t complain about staying here free under the generosity of Osono and Fukuo. Life isn’t supremely comfortable, but that’s how these witch years away from home are supposed to go, right?
After all the struggle though, the film reminds the audience that there is a way out of these sorts of mental depths. In Kiki’s case, she’s pulled out by a friend.
Ursula– the solitary painter Kiki met after that debacle with the crows– comes knocking on her door one day, and upon seeing Kiki’s condition, declares that she’s coming with her back to her cabin in the woods. She drags a shy Kiki to her home, and forces her to relax for the next couple of days.
As a painter, Ursula tells her that she understands what Kiki’s going through. She explicitly draws the connection between Kiki’s loss of flight and the difficulties of Artist’s Block. She doesn’t ask Kiki to do anything, letting her recharge in her home, surrounded by nature and fresh-brewed tea. It may seem like an unattainable fantasy for anyone who’s been overwhelmed by the stresses of life– who among us hasn’t wished at some point to be whisked away to a cosy little cabin in the woods to recuperate?– but nonetheless it’s a deeply comforting one to see on-screen. Ursula is all at once a cool older sibling to Kiki and a sort of mentor figure, giving her advice on how to make it through this dry spell.
This stretch of the film, encased in the warm wooden walls of Ursula’s cabin, is as interesting to me as Shizuku’s frenzy of activity in the latter half of Whisper Of The Heart. They’re two sides of the same coin– one showing the height of the creative process, one showing the lowest depths of it. As freeing and energising as being in the height of a creative flow can be, it is equally important to acknowledge the tough realities of choosing an artistic career path. Even if it’s done just as a hobby and not a full-fledged job, being mindful of one’s limits is never a bad thing. Few of us have an Ursula to pull us out of our funks.
Where Whisper Of The Heart presents the rousing beginning to someone’s creative journey, spurred on by the passion of another, Kiki’s Delivery Service is about the uncomfortable bits in the middle, characterised by Artist’s Block and careful recuperation. At the end of the day, despite it all, it is worth it. It is worth it to create, and we see that reflected in the manic focus of Shizuku chipping away at her book, in the exhilaration and wonder Kiki displays in flight, and in the resolutions to both of these films which I did not want to fully spoil. Being an artist– whether your medium is the page or the screen or the sounds sent by plucked strings and vocal cords– is a rough journey sometimes, but you’ll get there in the end. With a little caution and a lot of passion, we all will. That’s what these two great films taught me.
Written by: Ryan Kong
Edited by: Zhen Li
