A John Denver song sits at the heart of a Studio Ghibli romance
In Whisper of the Heart, a bookish Tokyo girl notices one boy's name on every library card she borrows, then rewrites Take Me Home, Country Roads as a joke about concrete suburbs. The 1995 film was the only feature Yoshifumi Kondō ever directed, the man Ghibli hoped would inherit its future.
Hayao Miyazaki wrote the screenplay from Aoi Hiiragi's manga Mimi o Sumaseba, serialised in the girls' magazine Ribon in 1989. Studio Ghibli had pinned its hopes on Kondō as a successor to Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, but he died in 1998, leaving this as his sole film as director.
The story follows Shizuku Tsukishima, a junior high student with a habit of writing. Chasing a cat that rides the train, she finds an antique shop and a cat statuette called the Baron with glittering green eyes. The boy who teased her about her lyrics turns out to be the owner's grandson, Seiji, who is learning to build violins. He admits he borrowed piles of books hoping she would notice. When Seiji leaves for two months of study in Cremona, Shizuku sets herself to write a novel starring the Baron, stays up until dawn, watches her grades slide, and finally hears the old shopkeeper call the result raw but heartfelt.
Music carries the emotional line. Shizuku translates the Denver song for her school chorus and writes a comic version called Concrete Road about western Tokyo. The real translation was done by Mamiko, daughter of producer Toshio Suzuki, with extra lyrics from Miyazaki. Olivia Newton-John's recording plays over the opening. Licensing that song helped stall Disney's English dub, begun in 2003, until a 2006 DVD release. Miyazaki's son Keisuke, an engraver, made the woodcut of the imprisoned violin-maker.
Released on 15 July 1995, it was the first film in Japan to use Dolby Digital sound, and it became that year's top-grossing Japanese film at home, taking about 3.15 billion yen at the box office. The Baron later returned in his own 2002 spin-off, The Cat Returns, and a live-action sequel arrived in 2022.
Source: Whisper of the Heart
