I bring many books to the beach. Fiction, fantasy, memoir; short or long. I even bring pens, sometimes, to mark the margins. But seldom do I really read those books there. An immediate drowsiness descends as I perch upon the towel—the fabric stiff with age and dried sunscreen, its cartoonish aquatic designs bright in the sun, its corner bearing my initials to mark the item as my own in summer camps past. No matter the time traveled, distance forged, or the decisions made on which book to bring and why, I break the spine to read, and fall asleep almost immediately.
In this half-dream state, the beach remains alive around me: a soft shutter of waves on the shore, gulls cawing above or afloat the waves, simpers of sand grains as they race across shells and smooth rocks. I don’t usually dream, but I always jolt awake like I’ve been falling through one. The sudden jerk, heart beating fast, too-bright shine of the sun as I open my eyes, and the beach erupts corporeal around me, whether minutes or hours passed since I laid down. I’ve barely made it two pages.
When Marnie Was There (2014), a Studio Ghibli production directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, exerts this same dreamlike control: hypnosis, half-dreams, then the sudden wake up. Our main character Anna, who suffers an intense asthma attack in her home city of Sapporo, Japan, departs for the countryside to heal under the care of her foster parents’ relatives, the Oiwas, and to access the ever-clean air of the pastoral town. It’s an ideal vacation: no school, freedom to wander, a gentle breeze off the water. Like an overturned glass, the seaside marsh pools and ripples into the crescent-shaped sand beaches; its oblong body, resplendent and deep blue, hugs the dunes and grassy hills and beach-town shops against its shore. Anna watches boatmen chug and row across the still waters from her bedroom balcony. She breathes deeply for the first time in the film, sighs in relief: enrichment, repose.
Anna’s new home—red-roofed, lived-in cozy, with an uninterrupted view of the sea from that balcony—demands only her relaxation and curiosity, which she exercises by sketching the scenery of the town around her. One such attraction catches her eye almost instantly: the Marsh House, a mansion beyond the marsh flats. It’s the last house before the sea encroaches on the land, buttressed against the oscillating tides by a compact stone wall. Anna traverses the low-tide salt marsh to explore the seemingly abandoned building: dusty sheets thrown over furniture inside, toppled white-and-rust curlicue table and chair on the overgrown lawn. Only a bright bay window in the upper right corner of the house appears to glow from within. But suddenly, briefed just by the shot of ducks flapping among the plum-orange sunset waves, dusk has descended on the sea. Anna, who dozed in the yard of the Marsh House, wakes startled to find her path home blocked by the high tide waters.
The film’s animation feels like essential Studio Ghibli: languid settings that burst with unusual color and intricate details; characters with soft expressions and round, curious eyes; glossy plates of seafood and steaming cups of rice. Indeed, Anna’s discovery of the flooded path away from the Marsh House mirrors the moment in Spirited Away (2001) when Chihiro plunges unwittingly into the deep black waters that block her way home from the shores of the spirit world. And like Anna and the Oiwas, Chihiro’s parents also gorge on the most decadent, mouth-watering animated food I’ve ever seen. But the hazy otherworldliness of When Marnie Was There, in its 10th anniversary this month, often eludes the sprawling magical adventures contained in Spirited Away. The time Chihiro works in the spirits’ bathhouse, for instance, always feels real. Her story is not stuck in a dream, nor an indeterminate spot of time, and she returns to the human world with evidence of this fact.
Instead, Anna’s seaside respite becomes dreamlike and slippery, a form of magic in itself that alters our impressions of her reality. Rescued from high tide by a local, stoic fisherman, Anna glides away from the Marsh House, but she returns several times throughout the film, where she frequently spies a young blonde girl in that rightmost window. This girl is Marnie, Anna will learn, whose crown of pale locks spring into plump curls as an older woman aggressively brushes them. Before Anna meets Marnie, when Anna finally rows to the house one evening at high tide, their interactions read as unreal, almost illogically transitioned from a previous scene. A moment will snap to black—as, for instance, in a nighttime scene when Anna dines with her guardians—and then fade in as she, in the misty daylight, trudges through the marsh to the house. Or else Anna will be sketching near the beach one morning, rendering her own artistic version of that reality, when fog bursts across the screen, dissipating to reveal Anna waking upon a different island of grass in front of the Marsh House. The film resists a satisfying bridge from beat to beat, much in the way dreams hop imperfectly across nonlinear moments. And in both scenes, too, Anna wakes abruptly, this time in her bedroom.
Vague dream, jolted awake. Such is my experience, too, of any oceanside respite. One brings a book to the beach, with all intents to read, but forgoes that experience for a dream, the heavy eyed half-sleep, as one’s environment bustles around them. I could bring the shortest book I own (surely that at least could hold my attention, I surmise incorrectly), but the swishing whitewater caps and burning blue sky would still lull me under. Anna goes to the sea to heal, anticipates one outcome from her changed environment, but sleeps and wakes as the languid idyll envelops her. Our shared settings of tranquility offer this attractive other world: where ocean sounds silhouette one’s semi-consciousness upon the hot sand, where Anna’s forays to the fantastical Marsh House overlap with the material vestiges of her waking environment—and where a girl with golden hair descends to the dock in a long, ghostly nightdress and rows us confidently into the sea.
“Are you real?” Anna asks Marnie timidly at this first meeting. “In my dreams, I saw a girl, just like you.”
“Dreams?” Marnie replies. “Hm.”
The film’s tone and chronology at first treats Anna’s encounters with Marnie like fragments of a fiction, sleepy shadows conjured from her inner desire for companionship after her social isolation in Sapporo. Anna worries, too, that she burdens her foster mother financially and mentally, as she discovers her foster parents receive government money to take care of her. In short, Anna worries she only conjured up Marnie as an imaginary friend, especially after she doesn’t see her for several days; she comes to dread a reality in which Marnie does not exist. As in any daydream, beachside or otherwise, Anna lives vicariously through that friendship and the emotions she says she cannot replicate with any other person. If the story’s location first provided fresh air for a physically weakened Anna, its marshes and gentle surf now witness a young girl’s enchantment by true friendship, perhaps for the first time. It’s fodder for any dream: candor, kinship, and endless affection from someone you admire.
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The ocean, more than anywhere else on earth, elicits in me that feeling of pure boundlessness. But from the shore, the water’s flat horizon acts as a comfortable interruption, a theoretical end, to any unfathomable depth. For years as a kid, I lived near the beach, the water a feasible walk or drive away, summers spent on the dunes and beneath roaring Atlantic waves, that horizon unyielding and uninterrupted. The ocean became synonymous with idleness, for exertion to reach no farther than slipping beneath a wave and rising breathless on the other side. There’s a consistent scenery I depend on when I meet with the water, and in it, that solace of lying down and beach-dreaming. When inevitably something jostles me awake—the too-loud crash of a wave, clap of laughter, or seagull’s caw—I know I will wake up to the world I briefly left behind.
Yet equally have I lingered on that depth, that horizon, and the pitch dark caverns miles below it inhabited by alien creatures that prowl the ice-cold waters. (Have you, like me, scrolled many times to the bottom of the ocean?)
Anna’s marsh setting undulates only between high and low tide, never anything more frightening. Still, this unsettling ambiguity permeates her interactions with Marnie, a character as omnipresent—and as enigmatic—as the sea around her. As the ocean’s tranquil surface might conceal the tide’s ferocity and remote depths, the later interactions between Anna and Marnie undermine the girls’ straightforward sentimental kinship. Boat rides through high tide, an evening picnic with sweets, and a glamorous party relent to a spookier undercurrent. After their picnic in a beached rowboat, for instance, Anna and Marnie trade questions about each other’s lives. They wonder about the other’s parents and siblings and frolic through a small abandoned house nearby. Then Marnie asks Anna what it’s like to live with the Oiwas. Simple, straightforward, curious. But in a shot positioned from Anna’s perspective—Marnie smiling knowingly in the center and tilting her head slightly left—the screen kaleidoscopes from the edges, a deteriorating vignette collapsing inward. In the whirlpool, Anna grows confused; she can’t remember the Oiwas. An image fades onto the screen: rosy slices of watermelon on the kitchen countertop, the scene turning right to reveal the Oiwas in the living room, Mrs. Oiwa digging into a bag of chips and Mr. Oiwa sculpting an owl figurine.
Anna wakes up in the rowboat alone. Marnie sprints toward her from the Marsh House, saying she disappeared, and, still confused, Anna can’t recall Marnie’s question.
It’s a bizarre moment that receives no satisfying answer by the film’s conclusion. We wonder, like Anna, whether her time with Marnie has been the product of phantoms and shadows, not the objective experience she perceives it as. And yet, so quickly does the film ease back into the seaside repose it promised at its inception; how swiftly Anna forgets, it seems, this odd encounter, almost like it didn’t happen. Like it was a dream, lost beyond the strict horizon. The hum of nocturnal insects fills the air. The Marsh House looms in the distance. Any spectral presence related to Marnie can be tucked away for perusal later. We can sit on the beach and watch the waves roll in, and convince ourselves the riptide hasn’t made the waters rough.
Other clues, easy to ignore in favor of a glistening portrait. Shortly after Anna wakes from her vision of the Oiwas, the girls depart for the Marsh House, where Marnie has invited Anna to her parents’ elegant party. The foyer is alive with guests who bear all the marks of having arrived from a different historical period: evening gloves, brimless caps, swing dresses and matching jackets. Marnie’s long, puffed dresses, too, recall an era apart from Anna’s boyish shorts and t-shirt mainstays. Anna, who doesn’t voice any suspicions about stepping into a different time, leaves the party quickly and takes refuge on the stone patio outside. She’s overwhelmed by the guests, moreso jealous of Marnie dancing with a boy. When Marnie discovers Anna’s hiding spot, she takes Anna’s hand and guides her through a dance, singing a tune to keep time.
Though this time the screen doesn’t swirl into a prismatic haze, the scene lingers too long on Marnie’s face, her cerulean eyes trained exclusively on Anna’s wide-eyed gawk. Marnie hums and la-la’s through a haunting song, her vocals eerie in the quiet night. Anna, meanwhile, looks almost comically fearful, as if Marnie’s proximity and deliberate attention would be reserved only for a fantasy—a dream. But emboldened by Marnie’s song, Anna softens. She dances. It’s as if the players have remembered their accompaniment, with Takatsugu Muramatsu’s score paused in tandem with Marnie’s bewitching voice. The strings rise softly, imperceptibly—and once more, we slip away from this bewildering, almost supernatural encounter in the Marsh House and into the familiar serenity of its surrounding natural environment.
The girls dance around the well-kept front yard, and the full moon beams over the seaside town, when a passing driver discovers Anna lying beneath a shrub on the side of a local road, sleeping soundly.
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I’ve read my two pages, I’ve fallen asleep, and I’ve woken up. Hopefully I dove into the water once, stuck a toe in at least, to satiate my questions about the ocean temperature, whether frigid or warmed by the sun. But perhaps the day has dwindled, and we’re packing up as the sun sets, designated idle time abandoned as we walk across the uneven sand and back to our shoes.
Anna’s time by the sea, too, is coming to a close. She doesn’t see Marnie for several days after the party. While sketching the house by the water, she learns from a local artist, Hisako, that a new family lives there, and their renovations on the old house have begun. Anxious, hurt, Anna runs to the Marsh House, where she meets Sayaka, the daughter of the new family, who gives Anna a diary, Marnie’s name inscribed on the front. It’s proof, at last, that Marnie is real. Yet each entry charts the moments Anna spent with Marnie before, as if Anna had been the one who slipped into Marnie’s dreams, not the reverse. The film, here, borders that spooky-sentimental tone as it slides through Marnie’s memories, from which Anna is absent, quick flashes of now-recognizable shots we once thought belonged to Anna’s perspective.
Like my frantic searches into the ocean’s wildest creatures and creations, Anna’s own impulse to understand Marnie yields few answers; pages, indeed, have been ripped from Marnie’s diary. When she lays in bed that night, she stares at a sketch she rendered of Marnie’s profile, desperate to know who her friend is, as if the art itself is proof she is real. And so Anna closes her eyes to sleep, and the film cross-fades into another misty morning. (The next day? A dream?) Marnie reappears, and with her, answers to Anna’s questions. By the high-tide beach, she recounts her parents’ neglect and her grandmother’s and their maids’ abuse, a section of the film that features a genuinely unnerving flashback in which the maids drag a despondent Marnie to a nearby silo, promising the ghosts that haunt it will terrorize her throughout the stormy night. A crack of lightning scares them all away before they can throw Marnie in.
In the present, a horrified Anna envelops Marnie in her arms, grasps her tight, the sea eddying around their ankles. She brings Marnie back to the silo, dilapidated but still standing, to confront her fear of the ghosts—to recognize they aren’t real. It’s a failed experiment: Anna watches Marnie leave the storming silo with a boy named Kazuhiko, the one she danced with at the party. But Anna’s attempt to disprove the hauntings also fails because she cannot establish that the ghosts aren’t real—for, as a wicked storm like the flashback’s rages against the present-day howling building, Anna watches those phantoms of the past disappear out its front door. Marnie, the girl, is real; but is Marnie, her friend, also reality?
Sayaka and her brother later discover Anna sprawled on the side of the road, sick from exposure to the rain. Anna’s final scene with Marnie fades onto the screen as she recovers in bed, her eyes shut tight, chest heaving. It’s a fever dream at its peak, and the cleanest transition that suggests her encounters with Marnie are internal or imagined. As the heavy waves crash toward her, the most turbulent surf the marsh has seen, Anna forgives Marnie for leaving her at the silo and promises her she won’t forget her.
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It’s almost enough for me, this ending: the powerful if unfinished farewell, the memory of a tender friendship that changed Anna’s life, the small yet substantial answers that fill in Marnie’s history. But ultimately, if unfortunately, When Marnie Was There depends on its sentimentality to bookend its narrative. From Hisako and her foster mother, Anna confirms Marnie’s real identity: Anna’s grandmother, whose daughter was Anna’s mother. When Anna’s mother died in an accident, Marnie took care of her before she passed away, even lulling her to sleep with the song she and Anna danced to outside the party. Hisako confirms Marnie’s tragic story; her foster mother gives her an old photo of the Marsh House from the orphanage with Marnie’s signature on the back. It’s the kind of book-club ending you might expect of a beach read: mystery, solved.
But how much more breathtaking, I wonder, could the film have been with a less conclusive confirmation of Marnie’s identity. This ending isn’t poor by my measure, but for a story so originally imbued with ambiguity and so electrified by its idyllic setting—which also retains nature’s inherently perplexing, inexplicable, and volatile attributes—why not complete those parallels with the girls’ relationship at the end? We can guess at the truth of Marnie’s identity, fill in the gaps ourselves, and enjoy toying with questions whose answers have slipped beyond the film’s horizon. (Anna and Marnie, for instance, share such a strong kinship it reads almost explicitly romantic, a throughline complicated by Anna’s familial relation to her friend.) I’m reminded, again, of the sea’s appeal in the first place, of those early scenes when Anna first arrives and becomes transfixed by her new home. She returns to Sapporo with this novel information, perhaps healed, and indeed she obtains that desired familial connection she lacked as an isolated girl at the start of the film.
Yet what lingers, for me, isn’t the ending at all. It’s the film’s indefinable middle, those moments by the water that slink reality into dreams, and dreams into reality. Like when Anna’s vision inexplicably blurs as she forgets the Oiwas, or when Marnie steps off a cliff and lands unhurt on the ground, prancing across the marsh flats like a ballerina—or when Anna holds Marnie close at high tide, shoreless skyline behind her, shoes full of salt water, wondering if this is the last time she’ll see the girl she loves most in the world.