Three stars. Rated PG, for no particular reason
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.15.20
Hayao Miyazaki’s Studio Ghibli clearly has inspired the look and narrative approach of Japanese animated cinema.
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| When encouraged to look around an office laden with all manner of strange artifacts and colorful treasures, Mary discovers a mirror with a concealed compartment behind it, which contains a book of powerful magic spells. |
Mary and the Witch’s Flower comes by this influence honestly, since director/co-scripter Hiromasa Yonebayashi helmed 2010’s The Secret World of Arrietty and 2014’s When Marnie Was There for Ghibli, earning an Academy Award nomination for the latter.
Mary and the Witch’s Flower marks Yonebayashi’s directorial debut for his own recently founded Studio Ponoc. Although it has the gorgeous, hand-drawn lushness of a Ghibli production, Yonebayashi didn’t pay sufficient attention to the story and its characters; too much of the action feels random and unfocused, as if we’re watching the abbreviation of a much richer miniseries.
This is also one of those aggravating fantasies that fails to remain consistent to its own rules, and where characters, good and bad, are only as strong — or weak — as a given moment demands.
Which is sad, given that the film is adapted from Mary Stewart’s popular 1971 children’s book, The Little Broomstick. Yonebayashi and co-scripter Riko Sakaguchi have done it no favors; they’ve overloaded Stewart’s gently rural fable with a slice of steampunk that feels quite out of place.
(Yonebayashi clearly has a fondness for British children’s novels; The Secret World of Arrietty was based on Mary Norton’s The Borrowers.)
Matters aren’t helped by the fact that Netflix limits us to the dubbed British voice cast, robbing us of the more story-appropriate Japanese actors.
Mary opens with a cataclysmic prologue, as a young girl attempts to escape from a conflagration that destroys some sort of immense structure; she’s pursued by slithery, gelatinous creatures out of nightmare, their grasping tentacles attempting to absorb her. She seems to get away, but then a final blast of wind knocks her and the flying broom to ground in a forest, where tiny glowing blue spheres — which she has carefully sheltered — burst and have a most unusual effect on nearby trees and animals.
