Sharp Objects gets rated 18 by the BBFC

I finished reading Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects this week. The book has been turned into an 8-part HBO miniseries, and although I’m yet to watch it, it had very much been on my radar due to the expert way it had been marketed: ‘From the director of Big Little Lies, from the producers of Get Out, from the author of Gone Girl, and starring Amy Adams’. Any semi-cineliterate individual will know that that is a killer recipe for success.

‘Killer’ being the operative word. The plot revolves around a journalist, Camille Preaker (Amy Adams), who returns to her stifling Missouri hometown to investigate the disappearance of two young girls in the town. Having a tonne of baggage herself, including strained relationships with her frosty mother, the investigation causes Camille to revisit some of her demons, including the death of her beloved sister Marian, a death she never got over.

The Worst Acting Performances of 2017 [10 - 6]

Now that awards season is all wrapped up, it’s time for this blog to slowly wave goodbye to 2017 and start looking ahead to the 2018 cinematic year! As part of that slow wave goodbye, I will celebrate the best and worst of 2017 according to me! 

We shall start with the worst acting performances. Here was 2016’s worst performances list for reference. I unfortunately had to throw shade at Jesse Eisenberg, one of my favourite actors, in last year's Hall of Shame. I'm glad to report he reined his Lux Luthor in a lot in Justice League, and thus, avoids making the list a second year running. Phew!

10. Daisy Ridley, Murder on the Orient Express

Although the Star Wars actress is very pretty, has a nice screen presence and seems like a lovely person, she was far too lightweight in the role of Mary Debenham. The film is set in the 30s, and Ridley’s character is secretly having a relationship with Dr. Arbuthnot (Hamilton’s Leslie Odom, Jr). Such are the outdated attitudes of the time towards inter-racial dating, that Debenham and Arbuthnot have to keep this, as well as their involvement with the murder of Johnny Depp’s character on the train, under wraps.

Review: ALL SHOOK UP! (Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes)

Fun night outs dancing in London were a staple of my late teen and early-20s, and I wished this to be the same for my brother. So last night, me, Tom, and two of my friends hit the London’s 1950s & 60s Party at Bloomsbury Bowling Lanes for some good old fashioned rock n’ roll and jive-style boogying.

Restaurant review: GILGAMESH (Camden)

Gilgamesh advertises itself as a pan-Asian restaurant, bar and nightclub. I visited it with my brother using a LivingSocial deal that I had bought for £34. The deal entitled us to afternoon tea and free-flowing Prosecco for two hours. I personally tend to find LivingSocial deals more honourable than Groupon ones, and the 'unlimited Prosecco for 2 hours' part of the deal appealed to me.

My five favourite songs from FROZEN (2013).

A good musical has to have more than just one big marquee song. Frozen has several great ones, so I thought I’d do a top 5 of the ones that I liked the most. After all, it's a musical who's soundtrack I'm fairly well acquainted with, shall we say!

Book review: DAUGHTER (Jane Shemilt)

Although Jane Shemilt writes in lucid, gripping prose, her first novel suffers from several flaws.

A handful of photos I took when picking up my brother from University on Friday.

Coat: Miss Selfridge

Bag: M&Co

Leo in The Revenant-inspired earrings: Dorothy Perkins

Glasses: Twiggy for Aurora

The chaplaincy at my brother's college.

pretty Christmas tree.

From afar, the college has a touch of Wayne manor about it. Bruce Wayne's manor from the Christopher Nolan Batman movies, obviously, not the Snyder bastardisation.

We went on a ferry from Woolwich on our way back to cross the Thames back to Bromley, haha.

And, true to form, me and Tom had a proper sibling catch-up over our go-to junk food!

Film review: SOMEONE TO TALK TO [一句顶一万句] (Liu Yulin, 2016)

A couple get married, full of love and hope for their future together. Several years down the line, they barely speak a word to each other. Around their anniversary, one discovers the other has been cheating on them and filled with murderous rage, revenge becomes their raison d'être as they do everything they can to ruin their spouse's life.

Actually, I'm not retelling the plot for Gone Girl, but Liu Yulin's debut movie Someone to Talk to. Adapted from the 2011 Mao Dun Literature Prize, 一句顶一万句is an economical yet intimate look at what happens after the love has gone out of a marriage and feelings of resentment at having one's heart broken fester.

Niu Aigo (Hai Mao) is the jilted husband, who tries his best as the patriarch of the family, but unfortunately his modest earnings as a cobbler and simple vision for their future aren't to the pleasure of his wife, who has outgrown him, and has an affair with the wealthier local wedding planning magnate. The film is considerably less kind to her, and rightly so, given she makes comments that make her seem like a  right gold-digging shrew. Woman knew her husband was poor when he married her; she doesn't get to screw everything up when that slowly sinks in.

In only his second film role, Hai Mao is just wonderful as a man who, after being wronged, is all affront and sharp edges, until self-realisation (and a few convenient plot machinations) give him the self-realisation to let go and become a stronger person for it.

His character essentially goes through all five stages of grief through the course of the film, and in doing so, exhibits some spiteful colours. But it's a testament to Mao's humane, heartfelt performance that even at his lowest points, you're rooting for this guy to pull through. His character was reminiscent of John C. Reilly in Chicago, another pitiable cuckold, and it's rare that cinema not only focuses on the person who's been left behind, but the person who was left behind happens to be male.

Someone to Talk to also features a subplot about Aigo's older sister's ill-fated online dating adventures and how she eventually settles, because, as she matter-of-factly states, 'I'm 39. I couldn't get anyone younger'. This kind of pragmatic, frank dialogue makes Someone to Talk to by far the most honest Chinese film I've seen this year (although there's not much in the way of competition).

Liu Yulin directs the story in such an unfussy, natural manner, with a working class Chinese town as the backdrop, I was invested in the plot in a way other films with more frills have failed to achieve. One scene, where Aigo angrily takes his frustration at his wife gallivanting out on his young daughter, carried genuine pathos and was far more powerful than anything I watched in yesterday's manufactured, sappy, The Shite Between Oceans.

I like a good revenge flick a hell of a lot more thanas much as the next person. Films like Gone Girl and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo contain scenes which imbue me with sadistic wish fulfilment at various men who have wronged me. I myself can nurse a grudge for quite a while, although my modus operandi is significantly less bloody and a tad pettier than anything Amy Dunne or Lisbeth Salander confect; that bellend Stefan who racially abused me over a year ago is immortalised in my Fantasy Football team name, 'Stefan is a Kuntz'.

But there's a lot to be said for Someone to Talk To's more forgiving approach. 

Someone to Talk to is a sincere and profound look at loneliness and the multifaceted nature of marriage, elevated by the magnanimous treatment it gives its protagonist. It illustrates how toxic holding onto past transgressions can be, not just to oneself, but to those that we love. Ultimately, it encourages the protagonist and the audience to look beyond, not behind.

Perhaps it's time I, like Aigo, made like Elsa from Frozen, and Let It Go. Good news for Wasteman, Watford fan and The Wolf of Fleet Street, then.

8/10

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If you enjoyed this review, do check out my other ones, which include a fair few Chinese movies.

Clever Girl (and Thirsty Girl).

The ultimate date movie Gone Girl is on Netflix, which allows me to pore over every shot and admire the precision with which David Fincher bought the novel to life. A touch I particularly liked was displaying Amy's undergraduate and Masters certificates:

Like the scheming eponymous lead, I also hold an undergraduate and a Masters degree. Unlike Amy Wexford Elliot Dunne, however, they're from institutions slightly less distinguished than Harvard and Yale.

All that being said, if my brother succeeds in graduating from Cambridge, then gets his MSc from Oxford or an American Ivy League, then he can consider himself as decorated as Amy!

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I saw The Light Between Oceans yesterday. I thought it was absolutely bloody awful (Light Between Oceans? More like SHITE between Oceans), bloated, over-sentimental, and various characters' actions didn't seem consistent with their personality that they'd exhibited previously. It was even worse than The Place Beyond the Pines, if that's possible.

Although Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander both gave strong, affecting performances as the parents who are blighted with miscarriage upon miscarriage, I'm starting to find Alicia Vikander's continual thirst for Oscar glory a little trying. You just won one girl, calm down a bit!

This frustrates me because there's no doubt that Vikander is a great actress (loved her work as the alluring robot Ava in Ex Machina), but I feel her talents would be put to better use if she didn't try so hard. That she won the Oscar this year for her work in The Danish Girl, a film which encompasses the Trifecta of Awards Thirst: Eddie Redcarpet, director Tom Hooper and Alicia, illustrates that begging for awards can reap its desired effect.

Personally, I'm not averse to an actor campaigning relentlessly if I thought they deserved the gold (#YouDoYou), which is why I'm a lot more forgiving to Anne Hathaway for working the awards circuit, hard, in 2013, because she slayed as Fantine.

But it's just a shame Alicia had to win and in doing so, stealing Rooney Mara's Oscar for such a brazenly awards-orientated role of the put-upon supportive wife, as opposed to her more intelligent and restrained performances in Ex Machina or The Man from U.N.C.L.E, performances that were far more engaging and allowed her natural grace to shine, rather than sobbing incessantly, which was all she did in The Danish Girl. I like my Oscar-winning acting turns to come with a bit more nuance.

I do like Alicia (when I saw her first in 2012's Anna Karenina I described her as 'a very pretty Swedish actress'), and those big brown eyes of hers were just made for emoting. And despite The Light Between Oceans craving awards, it probably won't receive them, as the film has (rightly) been received with muted reception in the US, so graciously, I won't have to resent her more during this year's Oscar season.

But with another Oscar-begging title out next year, Tulip Fever, I'm afraid I'm going to have to brand Alicia Vikander the female Eddie Redmayne in terms of serially appearing in awards-bait. Eddie Redmayne has a less-than-flattering monicker 'Eddie Redcarpet', given in reference to how he played a disabled character and a transgender character, back to back, in order to receive an Oscar win and a nomination, respectively. Alicia Vikander is approaching this level of strategic film choices, and thus, I have no choice but to dub her, Felicia Vikander.

Side note: Alicia wasn't the only one guilty of being a little too keen to win her Oscar this year, as Leonardo DiCaprio and Brie Larson were campaigning endlessly, to the point where it also turned me off Brie (I thought Saoirse Ronan should have won for her majestic performance in Brooklyn). Between those three, they made 2016 the desperate Oscar campaign I'd ever had the misfortune of witnessing. (I love you Leo, but was The Revenant a cold shoot by any chance? You hadn't mentioned).

These three's Oscar thirst was further accentuated when compared to the behaviour of Brit Mark Rylance, winner of Best Supporting Actor, who did zero campaigning, and didn't even show up to BAFTA, the movie award body of his homeland, to accept his gong, because he was acting on Broadway at the time.

So, whilst thirst paid off in Leo, Alicia and Brie's cases, it's encouraging to see that some actors don't feel the need to try so hard, and were happy to let their acting do the talking.

Two Omelettes I Cooked This Week.

When I was on holiday in Amsterdam in June, I had the sickest omelette. It tasted great, but I took slight umbrage at having to shell out an extra Euro for every extra ingredient. I knew it would be much more financially viable to cook my own omelette; the only problem is that I don't usually have time and I'm not the most culinarily gifted. 

Well, circumstance would have it that this week, I made time. On Thursday, I visited my friend Rebecca's new flat for the first time, and we cooked together, and on Sunday, I made Tom a meal by way of reciprocation for all the times he's cooked me a delicious hangover cure. In producing two omelettes in such short succession, it allowed me to hone my skills at making them whilst the production process was still fresh in my mind.

Omelette 1 (Thursday omelette)

Step 1: Cut potatoes and fry them with oil

Step 2: Cut onions and fry them with oil too (I used three onions)

Step 3: when the onions and the potatoes are about equal time from being cooked, put the onions in the same frying pan as the potatoes

Step 4: whisk eggs in a cup. Pour the eggs (6 were used here) into the frying pan and distribute evenly around the pan to bind the ingredients together

End product, viola!

Omelette 2 (Sunday omelette)

The main difference between this one and the first one was the inclusion of cheese, which worked with the eggs to bind the onions and the potatoes together. I also included parsley (which Rebecca told me added to the flavour of omelettes), and, because I am absolutely obsessed with onions, I use red onions as well as white ones.

Step 1: Cut potatoes and fry them with oil. I cut these pieces much smaller than Thursday's, so that they'd cook faster

Step 2: cut red and white onions into small pieces

Step 3: (slightly different because I could only find one frying pan, ha). I had fried the onions for about 15 minutes in this frying pan before I put the onions in with them to cook. Parsley was also added (and a cheeky bit of salt)

Step 4: whisk eggs and pour them into the frying pan to bind all the ingredients together. Add cheese to omelette after eggs have begun to set. We used more ingredients this time, so used 9 eggs for the omelette.

I didn't take a final photo because it wasn't very aesthetically pleasing, haha. But me and Tom polished off everything that was in the photo above in one sitting, so who cares how it looked? XD

Overall, had a really fun time making these two omelettes. When Tom comes back from Uni in a few weeks, I reckon I'll chop a few pieces of salami and embed them into the omelette. Maybe add tomato too. I could go on and on and on. Who knew, cooking can be enjoyable?!

The Shade Between BBFC Insight.

Derek Cianfrance, the director of the sobering romantic drama Blue Valentine as well as the ambitious but ultimately disappointing The Place Beyond the Pines, both starring Ryan Gosling, has another film out this year, not starring Ryan Gosling. The film in question has a clunky title to rival its predecessor: The Light Between Oceans.

This film is already out in the States but is not released here until November, although it has been given a BBFC rating. It is rated 12A, unsurprisingly, given it got a PG-13 in the States (and as you should know by now, ~90% of PG-13s align to 12As here, and if they don’t, I usually write a blog discussing/questioning why).

The short insight made me cackle, as, if I didn’t know better, I would think the BBFC were throwing shade at the movie’s male and female leads:

The film revolves around a lighthouse keeper and his wife, who discover a baby washed up on the shore. Having grappled with conception and several heartbreaking miscarriages, they decide to raise the baby as their own. The protagonists are played by Michael Fassbender and stealer of Rooney Mara’s Oscar this year Alicia Vikander, who are a couple in real life.

However, the more cynical of moviegoers don’t buy this, and think that their relationship is a Weinstein Company-manufactured showmance, created for the PR of The Light Between Oceans; a belief given further fuel during the BAFTA ceremony this year, when the Kiss Cam centred on them and they refused to smooch. One person believes this showmance theory so much they even have a Tumblr account about it.

I’m undecided about the veracity of the claims on that Tumblr account, and frankly, celebrities’ love lives are none of my goddamn business anyway. But I was tickled by the BBFC insight, and immediately wondered if the BBFC were in their own way, giving a veiled message about how much they bought into the Fassbender/Vikander relationship. 

As if describing their sex life as ‘infrequent’ wasn’t bad enough… ‘moderate’, too. Dayum.

(Or, you know, they were just genuinely describing the content of the film and I could be reading too much into three words and need to stop assuming everyone is as Shady McGrady as I am.)

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In other sort of BBFC-related news, when my brother turned 18 this year, I couldn’t resist using it as an excuse to a) give a shoutout to my favourite film certification board and b) plug three excellent films that I'm always hollering at him to watch in order to enrich our level of repartee and inside jokes at others' expense.

Channel 4 pulled a blinder on Sunday night, screening The Wolf of Wall Street, so I forced Tom to watch it, which is good because for the sake of completeness, we’ve watched practically all the Jonah Hill movies together now (minus True Story, but I have zero interest in that film; it looks like a prolonged, failed, Oscar beg on his and James Franco’s part and no one got any time for that. It was gruelling enough having to sit through Jonah’s WoWS co-star beg for his Oscar).

Tom, being the good man that he is, said he enjoyed it a lot, especially given that he’d caught an outdoor screening The Big Short in London last week and found it dry A F. I’m glad his mathematical prowess translates to being able to determine the wheat from the chaff in terms of films about finance, too.

As I’ve said before, several of the clown dude-bros who I’ve had the serious misfortune of going on dates with fancy themselves a kind of Leo in WoWS-type character, so it was funny to watch the film with Tom and delve into the psyche of these clowns (or so they wish).

Next up from that Facebook status, I’ll be bullying my brother into watching Gone Girl, so he can understand the psyche of the woman these clowns have chosen to go on a date with. 

(or so I wish).

Two OOTDs: Hanging out with my BFF.

Dress: Miss Selfridge

Earrings: TK Maxx

Dress: Marks and Spencer

Glasses (in both photos): Red or Dead

(lol, Tom's wearing the same T-shirt in both! Either he doesn't have enough clothes or I may have too many. I'll let you decide which is the truth).

OOTD: going to pick up A-level results with my brother

It was A-level results today, and my brother did OK. ("OK" is an understatement: he got into his first choice Uni and was singled out on two websites for his exceptional performance. But I've raved about him on several social media outlets already, so to avoid getting repetitive because I never repeat myself. Cara Delevingne was shit in Suicide Squad, by the way, I'll just display my grungy outfit!

Glasses: Red or Dead

Homer Simpson T-shirt: H&M

Cardigan: H&M

Here he is breaking the good news to mum. Why so serious mate?

Sorry, I know I just said I wasn't gonna repeat myself but... TOM ABSOLUTELY KNOCKED IT OUT OF THE PARK, YOOOOOOOO. #LIKEABOSS Could not be more proud to call myself his sister. Boy is clever, compassionate, kind, and doesn't take himself too seriously. All things I'm not.

He's gonna go far. 💯

Film review: FINDING DORY (Andrew Stanton and Angus MacLane, 2016)

Disney Pixar have made some incredible movies, several of which are in my personal top 100 movies list (such as Up, WALL-E and Inside Out.) Finding Nemo is my favourite of all of those; a film so beautiful and affecting that just hearing the track ‘Nemo Egg’ brings me to tears. Finding Nemo's message of the importance of family, and the lengths one will go to protect them, really struck emotional chords with me.

I was full of trepidation for the sequel, Finding Dory, a film which I thought really did not need to be made, full of Marlin-esque fear that, like he almost did in the first film, this pointless follow-up would cause me to "lose" Nemo.

(I picked this poster because the tagline is the T-shirt Margot Robbie wears as Harley Quinn in Suicide Squad, which is out this Friday and I'm stoked for!!)

And, sad to say, my fears were realised. The issue with Finding Dory that troubled me was how artificial the conflict was: in one of his strops, Marlin says to Dory, “Go right over there and forget, Dory. That's what you do best.” Now, I get that people say things they don’t mean when their emotions get the best of them, but even in a fit of rage, you wouldn’t say something that hurtful to a friend, especially a friend who played no small role in getting your son back in the first film. People audibly gasped in the cinema when he said that, which illustrates that the writers overplayed their hand and misjudged the tone.

I feel like I’ve been criticising scripts left, right and centre this year (The Neon Demon was poorly written, that bad Chinese romance I watched had a bad script, yada yada yada), and probably, line-for-line, Finding Dory is no worse written than something like Despicable Me, a film I have quite a soft spot for. But in that one line, it just felt like the writers of the film realised they didn’t have enough for a feature length film, so had to manufacture some drama, in doing so, make Marlin make this harsh comment which was really out of character. Furthermore, as part in punishment for what he said, Nemo takes a rather annoying turn in this film as well, constantly chastising his father and acting bratty, which again, undercuts their father/son bond that the first film built so effectively.

Other elements of the screenplay that jarred were that weird, unfunny Sigourney Weaver onrunning joke (like, what? This is about fish, not aliens, so I didn’t even see the point of it), and the lazy characterisation of Hank, the seven-tentacled octopus. Stanton et al were obviously trying to place a ‘crusty old cynic’ character into the storyline, but that trope was employed to much better effect in the form of the mean restaurant critic in Ratatouille, because they explored why it was that he was so jaded. In Finding Dory they just shove a bad-tempered character in as a foil to Dory's good nature, but we already had Marlin for that. 

This is predominantly why Finding Dory isn't fit to tie Toy Story 2's laces in the sequel stakes: in Toy Story 2, the writers both retained the central dynamic between Buzz and Woody, as their friendship, like Marlin and Dory's, is crucial to driving the plot and getting audience members connected to the characters and their plight. Furthmore, the characters introduced in Toy Story 2 were welcome and contributed to the quality of the film (I'm thinking of awesome cowgirl Jessie). This is definitely not the case in Finding Dory, where existing characters are hard done by in terms of character development, and new characters are downright superfluous.

This is epitomised in these two Cockney sea lions (voiced by Idris Elba and Dominic West; the film’s producers desperately trying to appease adult audiences with a The Wire reference, there) that felt like Pixar were trying to regain the belly laughs they had with the seagulls in Finding Nemo (rather than chant 'mine! Mine' the sealions chant 'off! Off!'), but it didn't work, especially as the way the two sea lions ganged up against a third, cross-eyed lion, felt borderline ableist.

The film's pedestrian plot (Dory finding her parents, who she suddenly remembers she'd lost) is given more emotional gravitas than it deserves by Thomas Newman's sensational score. The more eagle-eyed readers of my blog may remember that Finding Nemo features my favourite film score of all-time, so good that they often use excerpts of it on The Apprentice. The score for Finding Dory, whilst not quite as good as that (nothing ever will be), has to work twice as hard, given it is almost the only thing (along with Ellen DeGeneres voicework) that is selling this contrived story to us. The addition of a plaintive violin to highlight Dory's sense of isolation definitely contributed to the emotion of the film, and, as he did in The Shawshank Redemption, American Beauty and WALL-E, Newman deftly allows his music to accompany the plot without feeling intrusive. It's a travesty that this genius doesn't have an Oscar.

In isolation, Finding Dory isn’t a bad film at all. It’s got charm aplenty (baby!Dory with her massive  purple eyes and high-pitched voice is absolutely a-dory-ble #IllGetMyCoat) and in terms of jokes-to-laughs ratio, it scores above your average cartoon. Plus I simply couldn't hate a film that gives two members of the Modern Family cast voice roles. But Pixar isn’t an “average” studio, and its predecessor most certainly not so. I’ll be kind and make like the good-natured heroine of this film and invoke her memoryless property in awarding my rating. If I were to grade it in comparison with the first film, my score would be dramatically lower. 

Put it this way: as Sia's cover of 'Unforgettable' came on over the closing credits, I was hoping that Finding Dory would achieve quite the opposite in my mind.

57/10

Film review: WHEN MARNIE WAS THERE (Hiromasa Yonebayashi, 2014)

Remember when I complained about how due to the restricted choice of films screened at Cineworld cinemas, despite watching 42 films on the Unlimited card last year, I saw a meagre 2 foreign films? Well, I’ve already seen half that number of foreign movies on my Odeon Limitless card, at Panton Street Odeon, where I saw When Marnie Was There.

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Ever since she was young, 12-year-old Anna Sasaki has been an outsider. She doesn’t fit in with the children in her year at school, feels disconnected from her foster parents and her social awkwardness is compounded by a deleterious breathing problem, which rears its head when she feels upset or stressed.

Deciding the key to Anna’s breathing attacks, and hence, her timidity, is clean air, her foster mother Yoriko (whom Anna refers to as ‘Auntie’) sends her to spend the summer with Yoriko’s relatives, in a coastal town. A few days after arrival, Anna spots a blonde girl in the window of a seemingly deserted mansion across the shore. The enigmatic girl introduces herself as Marnie, and a bond is immediately formed between the two girls.

Based on British author Joan G. Robinson’s novel of the same title, writers Masashi Andō, Keiko Niwa and Hiromasa Yonebayashi altered the location in the original story from Norfolk to the Japanese town Hokkaido. Graciously, nothing has been lost in translation. The story is simple, but told cleanly and elegantly, and the themes of bereavement and isolation, tackled with immense sensitivity.

As she embarks on her personal journey, audience members will recognise elements of themselves in the protagonist Anna, who is crippled with self-doubt, feeling she had never been loved due to her parents and grandparents having died when she was a baby. But behind those fragile Anime eyes, still waters run deep. She’s surprisingly intense for her age. The question of whether or not Marnie truly exists, or is just a figment of Anna’s imagination is soon broached. But you get so lost in the budding friendship between the two girls that it is only of secondary importance.

From the outside, Marnie seems to have an enviable life, living in a huge house with extravagant parties thrown by her parents. But inwardly, the two girls are just as alone and unhappy as each other. It is because of this similarity that Anna lets down her walls around Marnie, and we come to learn why it is that she feels so badly about herself. It is sad that a 12-year-old could feel so bad about themselves, but this just makes her blossoming friendship with Marnie ever the more rewarding. Throughout When Marnie Was There, the two characters embrace quite a few times, and it is refreshing that a film can capture the innocence behind such a sweet act.

As with all Studio Ghibli films, the film is exquisitely rendered. One shot, which taps into audience’s doubt of whether Marnie is real or of Anna is Fight Clubing us, is cleverly done without being so over-stylistic as to detract from the story. Unlike recent Disney and Pixar movies, which, for better or for worse, always feature a message, When Marnie Was There concerns itself with straightforward, unpretentious storytelling. The film is entirely about Anna, Marnie and their connection, and if anything about their relationship spoke to me, it was in an organic way, rather than feeling corny or heavy-handed. And finally, although it is by all intents and purposes a harmless U-rated film, it is not just the title that evokes memories of Hitchcock: there is a distinctly suspenseful undertone running throughout.

When Marnie Was There doesn’t reach the imaginative, pulse-racing highs of Spirited Away or the heart-shattering pathos of Grave of the Fireflies, but it is a delightful experience all the same, one which doesn't allow itself to get bogged down in the sadness to celebrate some of the richnesses of life: friendship, family and the power of memories. The hand-drawn animation is beautiful; I lost count of the number of beautiful visuals in it. At the film’s big reveal, I sobbed with abandon. Crying can be cathartic sometimes!

When Marnie Was There is said to be Studio Ghibli’s final film, although whether this is true proves to be seen. I sincerely hope that’s not the case: no-one tells delivers moving story like Studio Ghibli.

8/10