I even briefly wondered if the film might turn into a strange adolescent romance, given the fervor with which Anna and Marnie yearn for each other’s company.īut this type of clever uncertainty is also the stock in trade of Studio Ghibli, the animation company best known for the films of co-founder Hayao Miyazaki. (The film occasionally reminded me of Bernard Rose’s brilliant, seminal thriller Paperhouse.) Other times, it feels like a sensitive coming-of-age tale, as Anna’s anger over not having a biological family finds its correlative in Marnie’s sadness over her own distant parents. At times, it seems to take the form of a gothic mystery. Initially, it’s hard to pin down exactly where the story is going. More important, Anna only ever seems to visit The Marsh House in a dreamlike state their encounters usually end with her waking up in a field of grass or by the side of the road. Whether Marnie exists in real life is also initially up for debate: For starters, she seems to belong to a past era, with her beautiful dresses and her elegant, old-fashioned surroundings.
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The two become the best of friends, but at first it’s hard to tell why, other than the fact that they’re drawn to each other - mystically, passionately, even dangerously. Like Anna, Marnie is lonely - neglected by her parents and occasionally terrorized by her maids. But what’s this? In one window of the allegedly empty Marsh House, Anna sees Marnie, a beautiful blonde girl about her age. There, Anna finds herself drawn to a mysterious, sprawling, abandoned mansion (dubbed “the Marsh House”), which is reachable for her at low tide. When Anna has an asthma attack, her foster parents send her to an aunt’s house by the seaside, where the air will be clearer. A foster child who lost her biological parents at a young age, this girl seems forever to be poking away at an unhealable wound. Or rather, she sees herself outside it: Though the film is sympathetic to her self-loathing, it also makes it clear that Anna’s feelings of persecution stem from within.
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“There’s inside, and there’s outside.” Judging by the forlorn way she looks at her schoolmates playing among themselves, the lonely Anna, we suspect, is very much outside the circle. “In this world, there’s an invisible magic circle,” our heroine Anna, 12, tells us at the beginning of the new Japanese animated film When Marnie Was There, based on Joan G.