Whisper of the Heart

Shizuku keeps checking out library books and finding the same name on the borrowing card before her own, Seiji Amasawa, someone she has never met, who apparently reads everything she reads. When she finally meets him he is in the back of an antique shop owned by his grandfather, making a violin. He intends to go to Italy to learn to become a luthier. He is fourteen. He has already decided.

The film is about what it looks like to be that certain at that age and what it does to the person watching. Shizuku writes. She wants to write. She does not yet know if she can, not whether she has talent, but whether she has the specific discipline to find out if she has talent. Watching someone who has already answered that question for himself is clarifying and destabilizing in equal measure.

Yoshifumi Kondō directed it in 1995 from Miyazaki's screenplay. Kondō was considered Miyazaki's most likely successor at Ghibli. He died of an aneurysm in 1998 at forty-seven, overworked during production on this film and Princess Mononoke. Whisper of the Heart is the only feature film he ever directed. That context arrives after the film ends and does not leave.