Mary and the Witch's Flower [2018] Full HD Movie Free Download
Young Mary follows a mysterious cat into
the nearby forest and discovers an old broomstick and the strange Fly-by-Night
flower, a rare plant that blossoms once every seven years. Together, the flower
and the broomstick whisk Mary above the clouds, and far away to Endor College
-- a school of magic run by headmistress Madam Mumbletypeg and the brilliant
Doctor Dee. But there are terrible things happening at the school, and when
Mary tells a lie, she must risk her life to try and set things right.
Initial release: July 8, 2017 (Japan)
Director: Hiromasa
Yonebayashi
Based on: The
Little Broomstick; by Mary Stewart
Featured song: RAIN
Did you know: "Mary and the Witch's Flower" is the
sixth-highest-grossing Japanese film of 2017 (US$29.1 million)
As in
Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland – or indeed the Ghibli masterpiece My
Neighbour Totoro – the path to the magical world is revealed by a little
animal: in this case, a black cat called Tib, who appears one lunchtime
while Mary (spiritedly voiced by Ruby Barnhill) lazes on the hillside
by her great aunt’s house.
The first feature production of the new Japanese animation house
Studio Ponoc — founded by veterans of Hayao Miyazaki’s celebrated Studio Ghibli
in the wake of Miyazaki’s supposed retirement – Mary and the Witch’s Flower is
a film modest in temperament but ambitious in effect. Adapted from Mary
Stewart’s 1971 children’s book The Little Broomstick and
directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, its slight story and simple characters still
build to eye-popping and even unsettling imagery.
The colors are garish, the
Ghibli touches call attention to themselves, and the action is so confined to a
few simple locations that Endor eventually comes to resemble an abandoned
playground, a spectacular palace of unrealized potential. This isn’t an ugly
film by any stretch, but there’s a bootlegged vibe to it, and even the best
moments feel like they’ve been photocopied from a true original.
And once the flower is discover and the broomstick untangled,
it’s a short flight to Endor College, a school for witches and warlocks
where Mary is received by the ebullient headmistress Madame
Mumblechook (Kate Winslet) and teacher Doctor Dee (Jim Broadbent) as a new star
pupil, thanks to the fly-by-night's impressive effects.
It may not quite match the best of the Ghibli classics, which
gathered complexity and resonance as they went along: a child’s coming-of-age
could transform into a disturbing metaphysical adventure; a classic legend
could become a nuanced meditation on environment and identity. But what Mary
and the Witch’s Flower lacks in dimensionality, it makes up
for in wonderment.
The chintzier the storytelling
becomes, the cheaper the animation begins to seem. Are the villains so
one-dimensional and underwritten because they look like they’ve been plucked
from the doodles in Miyazaki’s wastebasket, or do they look like secondhand
character designs because they’re so one-dimensional and underwritten? It’s
both hard to tell and ultimately irrelevant, but other flaws are easier to see
for yourself.
The filmmakers are clearly aware of the Potter angle, and have a
little fun with it; in one brief scene, we see a boy in round glasses
struggling to mount a broomstick. (Mary, of course, is a natural.) But what
stays with you after this movie — like Miyazaki’s films — is not so much what
happens, but the way the story is told in pictures. Yonebayashi gives us a
picturebook English estate, surrounded by lush forests and Impressionist-worthy
flowers, under moody blue-and-violet skies and cottony mists. A wary-eyed cat,
who becomes Mary’s co-conspirator, pads through the grass with stealthy
softness. The roller-coaster broomstick rides are both harrowing and enticing —
every kid watching this will head straight for the broom closet at home — and
the strange creatures Mary discovers at Endor are creepily odd without being
nightmare-scary.
It
transpires that Madame Mumblechook and Doctor Dee’s designs
on Mary aren’t entirely pedagogical, and she becomes ensnared in a
dangerous experiment, along with a boy from Red Manor called Peter (Louis
Ashbourne Serkis), and an entire menagerie of surreal hybrid beasts. Escape
takes courage and resourcefulness rather than special powers – an admirable
narrative staple of the old Ghibli adventures, which Mary proudly
carries forward.
The story follows Mary (voiced in this English version by
Ruby Barnhill), a young girl who has just moved to a new country home to live
with her aunt, and is preparing anxiously for the ridicule and scorn she
believes is inevitable from the other kids; she hates her frizzy red hair,
she has no friends, and she’s a klutz.
But after chancing upon a
rare, mysterious flower which blooms once every seven years, she’s whisked
away instead to a vast
castle in the clouds called Endor College, a school for witches and warlocks
where novices learn to cast spells, pilot flying brooms, and otherwise control
magic powers. Yes, it sounds vaguely Harry Potter-ish: It’s not long before
Mary discovers that she herself is destined for great things, and that her personal
story is connected to events that transpired long before her arrival in the
world.
With “Mary and the Witch’s
Flower,” they’ve come both too close and not close enough, resulting in an
adventure that can never climb out of the uncanny valley it digs for itself. If
Ponoc truly hopes to make films in the spirit of Studio Ghibli, they’ll
eventually have to embrace the fact that Studio Ghibli made films that nobody
else could, would, or already had. That will prove to be a tall order, but this
new outfit might just have the moxie to pull it off. You’re meant to look twice
before you leap, but “Mary and the Witch’s Flower” suggests that Ponoc hardly
looks at all. For now, that’s what you’ll love most about them.
“Mary and the Witch’s Flower,” a tale of a little girl (voiced
by Ruby Barnhill in the dubbed version I saw; a subtitled version is also
screening) who is transported to a school for witches, might seem to be
following another, Hogwarts-ish path. But this story predates “Harry Potter” by
several decades: It’s based on British author Mary Stewart’s “The Little
Broomstick,” a 1971 children’s novel. Mary, the main character, has been sent
to live with her great-aunt Charlotte while her parents are away. Bored and a
little lonely, she wanders the grounds of her aunt’s estate and finds magic in
the form of a glittering blue flower and a broomstick. Just like that, she’s at
Endor College — but what initially seems like an enchanted place soon begins to
darken.
Though the film's early scenes have the tranquil texture of a
daydream, later on things become heart-racingly intense – not by means of
violence and mayhem, but through breathtaking images and vividly expressed
emotional stakes. Every feat of imagination is an equal feat of
draughtsmanship: that’s the nature of the medium, and perhaps the source of
that certain kind of wonder in cinema that only hand-drawn animation can summon
up.
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