Home Cinema and Culture “Whisper of the Heart” by Yoshifumi Kondo: this never happens again

“Whisper of the Heart” by Yoshifumi Kondo: this never happens again

by Anna Dalton

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In the first limbo — the last summer of childhood — Shizuku finds in the library form the name of a boy who takes the same books. The next morning, she composes a song in honor of the approaching First of September and meets a mysterious classmate reading a volume she forgot on a bench near the school stadium, and on the third day, a fat cat sits down in the subway car to Shizuku (in Japanese mythology, luring to luck and wealth. — “Culture”). The four-legged man gets off at the same stop and, casually meeting along the way, drags him into an antique shop, as if hovering over the city. The latter turns out to be a treasure trove filled with the most bizarre trinkets.

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A rainy autumn and dreary school life begins. Shizuku sometimes visits the miracle shop, but it turns out to be locked. One day, at the porch, she meets the same boy from the form, who turned out to be a reader of a lost book and the grandson of an antique dealer. A boy named Seiji unlocks the door and gives her a wonderful view from the back balcony of his hideout, which he turned into a workshop. The teenager carves violins and dreams of studying in Italy, which means that Shizuku will be separated from a new friend, the light of eyes.

The wonderful outside world seems to freeze, die, deteriorate. The departure of the cavalier is nailed to the ground and everyday life, but awakens the imagination, in which the little girl soars as freely as on the eve of awakening love… And here the visual accents of the painting shift into the sphere of retrospective experiences: Shizuku learns to see the world in a new, inner light and translate the experience of parting into a creative understanding of the first feeling. These dreams threaten to melt away like smoke if the girl does not find her own unique voice, and she begins to compose a book — a metaphorical story of her love.