Whisper of the Heart and On Your Mark get their first French theatrical release on November 4
Wild Bunch is reuniting Studio Ghibli's 1995 double bill for French cinemas, with Yoshifumi Kondo's film in a 4K remaster and Hayao Miyazaki's music video on screen in France for the first time.
Thirty-one years after they shared a bill in Japan, Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart and Hayao Miyazaki's short On Your Mark are finally reaching cinemas in France. Wild Bunch is opening the pairing there on Wednesday, November 4, reviving the double program that Japanese audiences saw back in 1995.
Neither piece has screened commercially in French cinemas until now. Whisper of the Heart — known locally as Si tu tends l'oreille — arrives as a freshly restored 4K print, having only come out on DVD and Blu-ray there in 2015. Miyazaki's short, made as the promotional clip for a Chage and Aska single, never got any official French release whatsoever, on disc or on screen.
Parisians can catch it early. Catsuka, the animation news site partnering on the release, is hosting a preview at the Max Linder on October 26.
Kondo directed the feature from a manga by Aoi Hiiragi. Its heroine, Shizuku, is a 14-year-old bookworm who also loves music; she keeps noticing that one stranger has checked out the same library titles she has. Hunting for that reader brings her to Seiji, who dreams of building violins, and what starts as friendship grows into a story of young romance and persistence. Yuji Nomi wrote the music.
The film has had a long afterlife: The Cat Returns later spun off from it, and a live-action version followed in 2022. It also carries a bittersweet place in Ghibli's history. Miyazaki had hoped Kondo would eventually take over from him, but Kondo died suddenly in 1998, and his death was among the reasons Miyazaki came back from retirement.
