Movie || Mimi wo Sumaseba / If You Listen Carefully || 1 hour 51 minutes
Hello ladies and gentlemen, today, we are going to travel back to July 15, 1995 where one of the classic anime by Studio Ghibli was aired. The story is of Shizuku Tsukishima who is enjoying her summer vacation in a local library, where she notices odd appearance of a name – Seiji Amasawa that often pop up in her books’ check-out list.
As the story goes on, she followed a cat that was riding the train to a mystery antique shop where she met Seiji’s grandfather, a violin maker and a strange cat statuette, “The Baron”. As she leans closer to it, she seems to hear it whispering something, something that motivated her, gives her the strength she needs and takes her to a future she’s never imagined.
Review:
” Country road, take me home … ”
A classic Japanese anime with a classic Western song, this anime is so beautiful in many ways. Country road, coincidentally, was also sang by Merlin in Kingsman when he sacrificed himself to save his comrades, listening to the Japanese version of it gave me extra feels and it’s especially amazing and fitting to the story, that set the feelings of having an adventure.
Despite the synopsis, this is a simple story with a simple setting in a simple town, a girl and a boy met by fate, the boy to become a famous violin maker while the girl is still struggling finding her talents and deciding her dreams to pursue. It starts off with a mysterious atmosphere to lay the foundation and to keep the mystery up for the reveal.
On the surface, it’s an anime with drama and slice of life genre where she experienced something that will change her outlook on her future, chasing her own dream and polishing her hidden skills with time and effort and her love in reading for it to shine and for her words to reach someone that she loved. Deep inside, it is like a precious germ to be discovered, a beautiful and pure love story. Their dreams are portrayed by the cat dolls in the story, a love story that is bittersweet and too vague to be real, and yet too hard to just let it go.
Overall, this is a classic anime that is worthy of time to see for a change, and it might in some way changes you but it will definitely be enjoyable if you opt for something simple and nice to take a breath from everything else. Who knows, perhaps you can also discover back what you’ve lost – the whisper of your heart.
Thanks for reading!
( 9/10 because I really enjoyed it and found the legendary lofi hip hop cover here)
Anime as a Cup of Tea 