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Based on a manga by Aoi Hiiragi, Yoshifumi Kondo’s anime “Whisper of the Heart” was one of the most popular anime titles of the 90s, even becoming the highest grossing Japanese film of 1995. Yuichiro Hirakawa presents his own version now, again drawing inspiration from the original story, but moving into different narrative paths.

Whisper of the Heart is screening in select theaters in the US, courtesy of Capelight Pictures

The film unfolds in two axes, one in the present, when our main heroes, Shizuku and Seiji, are 25 years old, and one in the past, ten years before. To take things from the beginning, during their middle school years, both protagonists are extreme bookworms, who compete for who will first get the new novel from the school library. Following Shizuku’s investigation on her adversary’s identity, the two eventually meet, and realize that they have too much in common,...

“Whisper of the Heart”, the favorite, coming-of-age Studio Ghibli film, was released in the distant 1995. Based on the homotitled manga by Aoi Hiiragi, it stands as the first movie of the Japanese Dream Factory that is not directed by Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata. Behind its success lies Yoshifumi Kondo, the director who worked on plenty of masterpieces, such as “Princess Mononoke“, “Grave of the Fireflies”, and “Kiki’s Delivery Service“. By examining the difficult path that leads one to discover who he truly wants to be, by narrating the stressful and clumsy process of entering adulthood and personal maturation, it unfolds a world full of realism, imagination, and strong emotions. But, let’s take a closer look!

The story revolves around Shizuku Tsukishima, a teenage girl who is in the last grade of high school, and, instead of studying for her exams, prefers to read literary books and …follow stray cats.

Who could ever say no to Studio Ghibli? For more than two and a half decades, the Japanese animation studio set-up by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata have continued to put out success after success, becoming quite probably the best-known non-English language animation studio in the world.

With the advent of Blu-Ray, the studio’s earlier films are slowly getting re-released in the High-Definition format, and Whisper of the Heart is the most recent to do so, and it is an absolutely fantastic film that has had a wonderful transfer.

Based on the manga of the same name by Aoi Hiiragi, Whisper of the Heart was written and storyboarded by Miyazaki and directed by the late Yoshifumi Kondō, and marked the second Ghibli film that wasn’t directed by either of the co-founders when it came out in 1995.

The film tells the tale of a young girl, Suzuku Tsukishima (Yōko Honna), living in Western Tokyo,...