Combined with the quality of the drawings capturing the way Anna looks, the way she moves and the bewilderment and embarrassment she often experiences, you really feel everything that’s going on in her soul throughout the film. Hailee Steinfeld (TRUE GRIT) plays Anna and her voice alternately conveys the yearnings and longings of a lonely, alienated adolescent along with the barely suppressed anger that goes with the territory. Every actor gets the tone of their character just right. As someone who normally disdains English dubbing of Japanese animation, I have to say that this is one of the best English dub jobs I’ve ever heard. I watched the English-dubbed version at the IFC Center because I needed to see an early show and the Japanese-language shows were too late for me. It was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who has been working as an artist/animator at Ghibli since 1997 (his first credit is PRINCESS MONONOKE), has been key animator on the last three Miyazaki-directed features, and directed one earlier feature, THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETY (2010), a film which has some similarities to MARNIE, but lacks the emotional richness. It’s reputed to be the last production of Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation studio which has given us a regular, if not so steady, stream of animated features by Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, among others, since 1985. WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE opened in New York on Friday, May 22, 2015, running in both English-dubbed and Japanese-language/English-subtitled versions at the IFC Center. That’s all the plot I’m going to give you, since the film will work best if you go in cold, not knowing what to expect. Revelations gradually ensue, resulting in the kind of emotional spectacle that some of us cherish but encounter too rarely in films these days.

While exploring the rural region where she is staying, she finds a magnificent old house that’s apparently been abandoned and eventually meets a beautiful girl named Marnie, who supposedly lives there, and embarks on a series of adventures with her in what seems to be some kind of ghostly realm.

It is about Anna, a troubled 12-year-old girl in modern Japan who is sent to visit relatives in Kushiro, on the island of Hokkaido, for the summer so that she can get a break from the stress that is giving her asthma attacks. WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE is a love story, a ghost story and a coming-of-age tale, all rendered in beautiful, painterly, exquisite 2-D animation.

When marnie was there house