Studio: Studio Ghibli (for Tokuma Shoten and Nippon Television Network)
Short Synopsis
Taku Morisaki, now a university student in Tokyo, sees a familiar face on a train platform and remembers his last years of high school in Kōchi, on the island of Shikoku. His best friend Yutaka Matsuno had been asked to show around a new transfer student from Tokyo, Rikako Muto: clever, athletic, beautiful and arrogant, unhappy at being sent to the provinces after her parents' divorce. On a school trip to Hawaii, Rikako asks Taku to lend her money, and he gives her ¥60,000 from his part-time job. Later she tricks him into accompanying her to Tokyo, where she hopes to stay with her father, only to find he has a new girlfriend and no room for her. Taku spends a strange, awkward night in a hotel with her, sleeping in the bath. Back in Kōchi, misunderstandings and resentments build between the three, until a confrontation in which Taku slaps Rikako, and Yutaka, who has feelings for her, punches Taku. At a class reunion years later, Taku learns that Rikako has been in love with him all along, and on the Tokyo platform he sees her again.
Why It Matters
- The film is unusual for Studio Ghibli: there is no fantasy and no adventure, only the small, painfully realistic emotions of teenagers, rendered with attention to the light, streets and seaside of a real provincial city. Its restraint is its strength.
- It was Studio Ghibli's first film made for television and an experiment in letting the studio's younger staff make a film cheaply and quickly, without Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata directing. It went over budget and schedule, but it remains an important early work by a generation of Ghibli artists, and it later received a limited cinema release abroad.
Notes and Trivia
- Its Japanese title, Umi ga Kikoeru, means "I Can Hear the Sea", from Saeko Himuro's novel, serialised in the magazine Animage.
- A live-action television drama based on the story was made in 1995.
- See also: Princess Mononoke (1997), Perfect Blue (1997).