It’s unclear in the beginning whether Marnie is an actual human being or a figment of the forlorn girl’s dreams or imagination (Anna’s first words to her future friend are actually: “Are you a real person, you look like a girl from my dreams?”). The film might have a female protagonist (or two) like many other anime films, such as A Letter to Momo (whose character designer, Masashi Ando, was the animator supervisor and one of the screenwriters on Marnie), but it is in imaginatively staged sequences such as these that suggest that Yonebayashi isn’t a simple Miyazaki clone but someone who’s capable of working within a tradition while also bringing something of his own vision to the table.

There’s also an impressive and scary intermezzo that starts off in Jane Eyre-mode and then morphs into something that can only be described as Ghibli Gothic. Like in the other Ghibli features, there are no outright villains, though that doesn’t mean that everyone’s always on their best behavior. Both, however, have blue eyes and childhood traumas that they can bond over. It helps that the two girls are almost polar opposites, with Anna a modern gamine with short dark hair and practical but not exactly pretty dungarees, while Marnie, with her long blonde curls and old-fashioned dresses, looks like a girl whose main inspiration for hair and clothes came out of a Fairytale Barbie catalog. The first half-hour leisurely lays the groundwork for the film’s unlikely central friendship between a people-shy and tormented young woman, who states out loud a little too often that she “hates herself,” and the gorgeous vision that is Marnie. Read more John Lasseter Pays Emotional Tribute to Hayao Miyazaki at Tokyo Film Festival

A French release in January will kick off the film’s international release schedule. Robinson novel, which successfully substitutes coastal Hokkaido for the Norfolk seaside, is a beautifully animated tale of the growing friendship and occasionally rather cloying emotional travails of two 12-year-old girls, even though the Frozen effect didn’t quite repeat itself when Marniewas released in Japan last July, where it did respectable but not outstanding numbers. This adaptation of the eponymous 1967 Joan G. A lonely and introverted Japanese tomboy strikes up an unexpected friendship with a vision of blonde curls in When Marnie Was There ( Omoide no Mani), the second feature of Arrietydirector Hiromasa Yonebayashi and reportedly the last feature film from Studio Ghibli for the foreseeable future.

When marnie was there studio ghibli