favorite summer stories │ whisper of the heart (1995)
I decided I was going to read twenty books over summer vacation.
I only watched Whisper of the Heart for the first time a month or so ago, but two minutes into it I was crying inside because it was not summer yet. In retrospect, I think I had internalized this post of @sylphofspace’s, which nails it. Whisper of the Heart is a movie that perfectly captures the spirit of summer, especially the summers you had when you were young: the way each day has so much promise but at the same time is free to be seized and filled to the brim or totally squandered and wasted, completely at your own discretion. The one moment that really gets it for me is when Shizuku spends the afternoon reading and making her way through a large bag of chips when her sister comes home and calls her out on not doing her chores; my favorite way to spend my summer days was to waste the entire day reading or moping around until the hour before my mom came home and then I would scramble to finish the list of things to do she’d left for me that morning before her car pulled up. An accurate picture of my own preadolescent summer existence, certainly.
Have to watch this movie sometime.