When Marnie Was There

Anna Sasaki is a withdrawn twelve-year-old girl living with her adoptive parents in Sapporo. Because of her asthma, she is sent for the summer to relatives in a small town on Hokkaido, where she has no friends and passes the time drawing. There she discovers a large, seemingly abandoned house across the marsh, and meets Marnie, a mysterious blonde girl her own age. The two become close friends, and the friendship gradually draws Anna out of her solitude, though Marnie's true nature remains unclear to her.

The film is an animated drama directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, his second feature after Arrietty and the second of four films he directed. Keiko Niwa, Masashi Ando and Yonebayashi wrote the screenplay, and Koji Hoshino, Yoshiaki Nishimura and Masami Hosokawa produced it for Studio Ghibli, with TOHO, dentsu and Nippon Television Network Corporation among the production companies. Sara Takatsuki voices Anna, Kasumi Arimura voices Marnie, and Nanako Matsushima, Susumu Terajima, Toshie Negishi and Ryoko Moriyama round out the main cast. Released in Japan in July 2014, the film runs 103 minutes and took in roughly 35 million dollars worldwide. It holds a 7.9 out of 10 rating on TMDB from about two thousand votes, and a critics' score of 7.5 out of 10 based on a hundred reviews, so audiences and critics are close in their assessment.