Yoshifumi Kondō

A fourteen-year-old shuts her bedroom door, sits down with a pen and tries to write a story, and the film watches her not get it right. That is the habit in Whisper of the Heart (1995), and it is the whole of what we have of Kondō as a director. Hayao Miyazaki wrote the script, with a cat figurine in a top hat and an antiques shop and floating islands, and it is easy to imagine his version. Kondō gives the fantasy a few minutes and spends the rest on a Tokyo suburb, a kitchen table and a girl's falling grades.

He had been drawing other people's films for nearly thirty years by then. He started at A Production in October 1968, worked alongside Miyazaki and Isao Takahata from the 1970s, designed the characters for Sherlock Hound at Telecom Animation Film, and joined Studio Ghibli in January 1987. There he was animation director on Grave of the Fireflies (1988), Kiki's Delivery Service (1989) and Only Yesterday (1991). We have not reviewed those and will not judge them here, but the animation director's job is to make sure a person moves and looks the same from one drawing to the next, and the everyday exactness of Whisper did not come from nowhere. It was the first Ghibli feature directed by anyone other than Miyazaki or Takahata.

What works is the second half, which is about writing and about what writing costs. Shizuku's grades slide, her sister Shiho shouts at her, her mother Asako is back at university and too busy to notice, and her father Seiya says something at the kitchen table that most parents would not manage. That scene moved us more than we expected, because it is a conversation about homework played as though a whole life hung on it, which, at fourteen, it does. Most films about young artists skip the stretch where the artist is not yet any good. Kondō puts the camera there and leaves it. Our caveats are the ones we made in the review: a boy who is given more certainty than he has earned, and a last line that says more than it needs to.

He went back to animation direction on Princess Mononoke (1997) and died in January 1998, aged 47. We will not pretend to know what his second film would have been. Watch the first for the bedroom and the kitchen table, and do not expect it to tell you whether Shizuku is any good. Kondō did not know either, and he was right not to pretend.