While 2013’s The Wind Rises and 2023’s The Boy and the Heron saw Hayao Miyazaki break his wizard’s staff, artistically speaking, this lesser-known Studio Ghibli cut from 1995, based on his screenplay, shows he was dwelling on creative responsibilities from early on. Featuring a typical Ghibli protagonist on the brink of adulthood – aspiring schoolkid writer Shizuku (voiced by Yōko Honna) – this teen romance doubles up as an earnest pep talk on how to commit to the artistic life. It’s not quite as sophisticated, though, in its understanding of the interplay between imagination and reality as Miyazaki’s later masterpieces.
It also features highly inventive use of that 2010s soundtrack favourite: John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads. Shizuku shows off her fledgling penmanship for a school performance of the song devising hilarious Japanese lyrics that satirise Tokyo’s “concrete roads”. But while her writing shows promise, her love life remains in the fantasy realm. Mainlining library books, she realises that the same name, Seiji Amasawa, keeps appearing on the lists of previous borrowers. It feels like fate is pointing her towards a soulmate – especially when a curmudgeonly cat leads her “like in a story” to an intriguing curio shop near the library.
