Buckle up, kids, it's going to be an emotional ride and if you don't cry at some point, you're dead inside and our friendship is over.
I will defend Studio Ghibli to the death for its incredible contributions to cinema. The fantastical stories, the breathtaking visuals, the music you can feel in your heart, the characters you never want to leave. The messages in these movies are valuable for people of all ages and cultures. These are films of love, adventure, friendship, kindness, environmental awareness, the meaning of family (and that family can be a very broad term). It's easy to feel like you know these characters personally, and you root for them to succeed. Unlike many Western films, Ghibli movies can have romances that don't dominate the story and that actually seem believable.
Which is why When Marnie Was There felt like such a slap in the face.
Like I said, Ghibli creates wonders, and Marnie is no exception. The subtle expressions draw you into the psyche of the protagonist, who is a complex, realistic young woman. The animation is fluid and flawless (don't get me started on how the food is rendered). As always, Ghibli handles its female characters in ways American studios (animation or otherwise) would be wise to emulate. In fact, I'm pretty sure this movie fails the reverse Bechdel Test, which means two male characters are never seen talking about any subject other than a woman. I don't think two male characters are ever seen conversing at all!
All of the above is enough to rank this movie near the top of my favorite Ghibli productions. And the cherry on top? The two principle characters - Anna the self-hating, introspective protagonist and Marnie the adventurous and mysterious stranger - seem to have something romantic going on. That's right. Two gals being pals, doing typical pal stuff like holding hands, slow dancing, and proclaiming their love for each other.
Jackpot.
Listen, we lesbians don't get a lot of positive screen time. I mean, here are some typical lesbian film premises:
Two "straight" women fall for each other. One of them will die or return to her husband at the end of the film. Apparently bisexuality isn't a thing either?
Two gay women fall for each other. One dies or is converted and winds up with a husband. The other kills herself.
Average straight white dude converts a foxy, free-spirited lesbian to the wonderful world of heteronormativity. All of the dude's friends are turned on by this.
Straight-up pornography for consumption by straight dudes fantasizing that the two unrealistic-looking ladies giving each other sloppy kisses and licking magically hairless genitals will proceed to pleasure him once they're done scissoring (which is not a thing).
Two women in a foreign country fall for each other. Somebody is definitely going to die. Or it will be a weird, ambiguous ending, full of melancholy and wide shots of gray landscapes.
Two women get it on in the middle of the movie for no real reason. One of them may not actually exist.
I could go on. The point is, lesbians, bisexual, and pansexual women don't get to see many stories about themselves that have happy endings. Trust me, I ship as many straight couples as any other internet nerd, but there's something different when I get the chance to ship a cannon queer couple. I see myself in them, a piece of my story that I don't really see with heteromantic pairs.
So when Anna - a character I relate to in many ways regardless of sexuality - holds hands and blushes with Marnie, I get hyped as hell. These two profess their love for each other, for crying out loud! My fiancé, Kelsey, and I were literally chanting for them to kiss. We get to see hundreds of straight characters kiss across all kinds of media every day. Cartoons, commercials, billboards, romcoms, action movies, on the damn street! But a gay couple? That's too edgy, not for children, too sexually weighted, immoral and inappropriate.
Which is why it was so frustrating to watch my ship strike an iceberg in the plot. Without spoiling the ending, I'll just say that the Anna/Marnie duo (or my ship name for them, Manna, as in "manna from Heaven") is morally unshippable, and not for reasons of queerdom.
Come on, Ghibli! You dangle this delight, this possible equivalent of all your spectacular and endearing boy/girl pairs, in front of my face, and yank it away in a sudden twist? Queer-baiting isn't cool.
The ending, frustrating as it was for someone who wants to see the romance she's waited for since childhood, was solid. Turmoil is resolved, hope for the future is established, wounds are healed. Even I have to admit that the final relationship between Anna and Marnie, despite being decidedly platonic, is heartwarming. But... but my little gay girls! All that build up! The hugging, faces flushed, after whirling in a romantic dance by the cove! It just wasn't meant to be...
So, the day hasn't come for me to get the queer characters I crave from the studios I love. But that doesn't make this a bad movie. Like I said to begin with, Marnie is magnificent, and I'll gladly watch it again and again. Marnie tiptoes to the edge of an LGBT animated feature, but doesn't quite cross the line. Perhaps that's a sign of progress. We're not there yet, but maybe, give a decade or so, LGBT kids will see princes with princes and princesses with princesses in their entertainment.
I'm extremely excited to see that.
(Note: I haven't read the book that the movie is based on. I can't speak for whether it was quite as queer-baiting as the movie. I do want to read it, because regardless of the presence of The Gays, this is a wonderful story.)
March 2019 update
I re-watched Marnie the other night, just over three years after I originally wrote this piece. Given the comments and traffic this post has received (far more than anything else on my little site!), something about the movie and its ambiguous queerness clearly strikes some nerves.
Before sitting down to watch the film again, I thought to myself, “Perhaps I read too much queerness into the movie on my first viewing. Maybe that’s why everyone is filled with such spite over this.”
So I kept an open mind as our two heroines blushed and danced and pined. I tried not to relate Anna’s sense of displacement and loneliness to my own queer childhood. I strained not to see myself in her as she gazed at Marnie with starstruck eyes and sobbed her proclamations of love to her from the battering waves of the marsh. I kept my mouth shut every time Anna’s mood plunged when confronted with “cute boy” talk or when Marnie danced with her beau-to-be.
As the credits rolled, I realized I had made a mistake. I said in 2016 that Marnie tiptoes toward the line of LGBT cinema, but doesn’t cross it. I was wrong.
Marnie is absolutely a queer film for me and thousands of others, whether it meant to be or not.
I understand that female friendships in Japan (and Japanese friendships in general) are different from Western friendships in terms of intimacy and physicality. I can’t claim expert knowledge of Japanese culture, but I’ve done a bit of homework on the topic, and I get how the differences can be significant, even jarring to an American viewer.
I also completely agree that representations of strong female friendships are important cross-culturally.
However, we seem to have plenty of those stories in movies, literature, television, and beyond. Which is great! I enjoy and value those stories, and there’s always room for more!
I’ve noticed, though, that while I can say that I appreciate those stories, the moment I amend the statement with a “but I sure would like more and better queer representation,” hackles are raised across the internet, and I harken to the sound of distant war drums.
I’m not asking for every story to be a romance, much less a gay one. I’m not ignoring the loveliness of the intimate friendship story that Marnie tells. I’m looking at a piece of cinema which was produced by a Japanese studio for a global audience, and I’m seeing something that maybe wasn’t intended to be baiting but is very easily read as such, and I’m formulating an opinion as an audience member.
The opinion that I’ve formulated has come from research, listening to other opinions (even the bitingly snide ones… goodness, folks!), and from my personal viewing experience.
Let’s look at that last one. What makes Marnie queer is my own experience of it. It may not be queer to you, and that’s perfectly fair! The marvelous thing about stories is that they can mean different things to different people, regardless of the creator’s intention. If you need a story of family bonding and a healing female friendship, then that’s what Marnie is to you.
To me, it’s a depiction of a queer childhood (check out this great review on the subject). It’s about a girl who feels painfully out of place, unwanted, and alone. She’s surrounded by options for friendship, both at school and with the Oiwa’s, but feels separate from the other girls in a way she can’t quite pin down, which adds to her crushing self-hatred. Then she meets a different sort of girl, and her heart opens up for her. She takes on the role of the flower girl with which Marnie danced, secretly, beautifully. She cherishes her sketches of Marnie, holding them close in her sleep. She stands in for Marnie’s male suitor, briefly becoming the masculine romantic lead in Marnie’s narrative.
Anna finds herself in these little moments, and leaves the Oiwa’s as a changed person, capable of better and deeper friendships now that she has a better and deeper understanding of herself.
I’ve been there. I’ve had a crush that changed my understanding of myself and my ability to contextualize myself with my peers. So many LGBT kids know that exact experience.
That’s what makes it queer for me, along with this one other detail. It’s been long enough that I’m not going to hold back from spoilers.
Marnie’s diary describes her dancing with the flower girl during one of her parents’ parties. That, along with so much of Marnie and Anna’s relationship, is described as as secret. Marnie lived a life of restriction and neglect. So many doors were closed to her, perhaps because of the nature of her family, perhaps because of the time period.
But the doors that were closed to Marnie are open to Anna.
In my personal version of the story, I like to think that Marnie is reaching through time to her granddaughter, encouraging her to open herself up and take advantage of the world that Marnie could never be part of. Marnie and the flower girl’s story could never be, but Anna has the chance to find her own flower girl.
I hope you find some piece of yourselves in Marnie. I hope for more overt inclusion in future films, and I think that’s a theme that’s appearing more frequently, for which I’m grateful. And I hope that all of our experiences can happily co-exist.