The Cat Remembers

METALEPTIC NOSTALGIA IN WHISPER OF THE HEART, THE CAT RETURNS AND IBLARD JIKAN

To explain the subtitle right off the bat, ‘metalepsis’ refers to the crossing of conceptual boundaries in works of art – the most obvious example is when a character looks out and talks to the audience and thereby acknowledges that a wider real world exists beyond its own fictional one. It can also be applied when we have a fiction-within-a-fiction: in Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose Of Cairo, a character steps off of a cinema screen to spend time with a young woman that repeatedly comes to see the film. The other characters stand around within the world of the film, unable to continue until he returns. Here, metalepsis is about traversing through different fictional ‘levels’.

Nostalgia is probably an easier concept – though I will be talking about two different kinds. The first is a collective nostalgia, a commonly held idea about the ‘way things were’ at a particular time. Our ideas about the 60s, 70s or 80s are shaped by a shared belief in what it was like, rather than the reality of each decade. The second is personal nostalgia, which we can think of as a particular rose-tinted memory of something that happened to us, often triggered by some stimuli in the present (a smell that reminds us of a great-grandparent’s kitchen, an episode of a television show that we haven’t thought about since early childhood, etc.). What both forms of nostalgia have in common is a kind of mental editing; nostalgia is a positive perception, one that results from remembering the good aspects of a period or event and forgetting the negative.

In the Isao Takahata film Only Yesterday, the film shifts the original source material from one type of nostalgia to another. The original Manga on which the film is based is an episodic story of the experiences of a young child Taeko in the 1960s. The setting conjures up a collective nostalgia of the era, but when adapting the story Takahata added a framing device set in the 1980s, where Taeko is a young woman travelling to the countryside and remembering her youth. The framing device shifts the nostalgia from a shared idea of the 60s into the specific personal memories of an individual. Thus there are two kinds of nostalgia functioning simultaneously – the collective nostalgia felt by the audience and the personal nostalgia of the character.

Whisper Of The Heart, written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by Yoshifumi Kondo, evokes nostalgia in a slightly different fashion. On one hand, the film will create a sense a collective nostalgia from audiences today as it captures the feel of the mid-1990s, but at the time of production it was a contemporaneous story. The opening creates another kind of nostalgia, the use of the song Take Me Home, Country Roads not only conjures a nostalgia for the time that the song was originally written and released (the 1970s), but also the song’s subject matter is one of a nostalgic longing for a long passed childhood home. (And, in fact, for me, the song evokes a personal nostalgia for old school music lessons from when I was 9 or 10)

But there is also a strange kind of near-nostalgia shown in the film, a kind of ‘nostalgia for the present’. Whisper Of The Heart is a slice-of-life narrative about a young girl named Shizuku who, in-between preparing for the new school term, follows a cat that she sees sitting on a train. The cat leads her through small alleys and up to a tucked-away neighbourhood where she discovers an antiques shop (that she was unaware even existed) which contains a beguiling cat doll. She also discovers love for the first time in the form of Seiji, a young boy who has already decided that his life’s goal is to make violins. Inspired and a little frightened by the clarity of his ambition, Shizuku resolves to write a short story. 

In the brief glimpses that we get of her story-in-progress, in the form of raw imaginative daydreams, we see a strangely vague but familiar world identified elsewhere as 'Iblard'. When Shizuku conjures up these images, she is viewing her surroundings in a positive light, emphasizing the good and ignoring the bad, applying the same kind of ‘mental editing’ that nostalgia does to the past.

Iblard is the creation of artist Naohisa Inoue, who has created several hundred paintings of this nostalgic landscape. These paintings were eventually partially animated by Studio Ghibli to create Iblard Jikan, a half-hour direct-to-dvd piece that evokes a strong sense of familiarity rather than otherness in its strange multicoloured landscapes. Iblard is less of a clearly defined fantasy world and more of a frame of mind, a way of looking at our own world. Indeed Ghibli co-founder Miyazaki talks about the ability to see the world ‘through Iblard eyes’, a means of rediscovering the mundane everyday world as something new and magical.

The world that she conjures up in her mind reflects the surroundings that she is used to; we often see the landscape from high up, looking down at a cityscape that merges with trees and vegetation. 

Thus, Shizuku’s flights of fancy in Whisper Of The Heart are not a young girl’s escapism, but rather a way for her to find something new and exciting in a world that she had previously only ever thought of as containing school exams, annoying elder sisters and friends with romantic problems. Falling in love and discovering a passion for writing allows her to see the world through Iblard eyes, to be nostalgic about the here-and-now.

The finished story that she herself writes is never depicted or described in detail on screen. We know that it involves the figurine of an anthropomorphic cat as its main protagonist, Baron, and that it strangely parallels events from the youth of Seiji’s grandfather (who later recounts this story to Shiziku). But the story did find its way to being told many years later, in the form of the Studio Ghibli film The Cat Returns, directed by Hiroyuki Morita.

The Cat Returns is the story of young Haru, who does not consider herself particularly good at anything, and has recently discovered that her highschool crush has a girlfriend. While walking home she saves a cat from getting run over. But the cat is no ordinary feline; it is in fact the prince of the Cat Kingdom – and now his father the King has decided that Haru must come to their realm and marry the prince. Desperate to find a way out of this situation, she is directed to the Cat Business Office (or Cat Bureau depending on the translation). She discovers a large white cat waiting for her, which leads her through various backstreets and upwards until they finally reach a small, magical courtyard, where Baron waits for potential clients in his small antiques shop.

The Cat Returns is sometimes criticised for being more ‘lightweight’ than other Ghibli films but this can be explained when we view it not as a film, but rather as a film-within-a-film, the story that Shizuku will eventually write after the events of Whisper Of The Heart. We can see the aesthetic shift in Shizuku's imagination – from the baroque and fantastic Iblard to the simpler, streamlined look of 'The Cat Returns' – as resulting from the process of Shizuku polishing and refining her story. Her raw imagination is vibrant and excessive, the finished story is clear and concise.

Both Whisper Of The Heart and The Cat Returns feature sequences where young girls follow white cats upwards through unknown backstreets, eventually leading to a circular plateau that contains a quaint antique shop with Baron the Cat waiting inside. Arguably, Shizuku is 'present' in both moments. In Whisper Of The Heart, the event is happening to Shizuku, while in The Cat Returns it is happening as Shizuku remembers the original event.

Taken on its own, The Cat Returns is not a nostalgic story. But when we watch it in the context of Whisper Of The Heart (and Iblard Jikan) it is possible to see that Haru’s adventure is itself a nostalgic memory of what was arguably the most significant day in Shizuku’s life. And here is where the nostalgia becomes metaleptic. For an audience, watching this sequence in The Cat Returns evokes a collective nostalgia for the film Whisper Of The Heart, reminding us of the original sequence. But because we are aware that Shizuku is somehow 'there', behind the scenes, writing the event that we see, it also functions as a communication of the character's personal nostalgia. Like the character stepping off the screen in The Purple Rose Of Cairo, Shizuku's nostalgia moves from one narrative layer to another, linking the past events of Whisper Of The Heart, our memories of watching the film, Shizuku's memories of that period of her life and the present story of The Cat Returns into a single nostalgic experience.

                                                                                                             - P. S.