Latest / MUBI Podcast / WHISPER OF THE HEART — Hayao Miyazaki takes “Country Roads”

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WHISPER OF THE HEART — Hayao Miyazaki takes “Country Roads” · MUBI Podcast

• 0:00
  Heads up, this episode includes some mild language nostalgia that may put a lump in your throat and spoilers.
• 0:14
  Back in 1970, a struggling musician named Bill Danoff was on a road trip from his home base of Washington, DC to Maryland.
• 0:22
  At the wheel, wind in her hair, was his girlfriend and bandmate, Taffy Nivert.
• 0:27
  They were heading to her family reunion.
• 0:29
  Bill remembers it must have been summer.
• 0:31
  Because I remember driving down that road was filled with Black-eyed Susans.
• 0:35
  It was a time of year when the Black-eyed Susans come out.
• 0:38
  That's the state flower of Maryland and they're all over the place in the country.
• 0:42
  And I just remember just seeing millions of them.
• 0:45
  Sitting in the passenger seat, fields of gold and black flowers rolling by, he started reminiscing about his childhood road trips in Massachusetts.
• 0:54
  Western Mass. I lived in Western Mass in a small city, and if you drove outside for about 10 or 15 minutes you were in the countryside.
• 1:02
  You go to the left a little bit, you're in the Berkshires, you go north, you're in Vermont.
• 1:07
  You know, it's kind of cool.
• 1:09
  While Taffy drove, Bill fished out his guitar from the back seat and started improvising a song.
• 1:17
  So I was just remembering all those things and just going,"Country roads, country roads." And that's all I had was the country roads.
• 1:24
  I knew it was gonna do that and that was it.
• 1:27
  And then we went to the reunion.
• 1:29
  But that hook, country roads, just wouldn't get out of their heads.
• 1:35
  They added a melody during another road trip to a gig in Chicago, and the lyrics hit him like a lightning bolt on a drive down to Roanoke, Virginia.
• 1:43
  You go down there and there's the Shenandoah River, and there's the Blue Ridge Mountains.
• 1:47
  And I just assumed, on the other side of the Shenandoah River, it was West Virginia.
• 1:52
  Well, it wasn't, apparently.
• 1:52
  It was Western Virginia.
• 1:56
  But I'm a songwriter.
• 1:56
  What do I know?
• 1:59
  But I remember it just came out as one piece.
• 2:02
  Almost heaven, West Virginia, Blue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River.
• 2:06
  Almost heaven, West VirginiaBlue Ridge Mountains, Shenandoah River I thought, well that's pretty cool.
• 2:21
  It was pretty cool.
• 2:22
  And when a friend of theirs recorded the tune, an up-and-comer named John Denver, Bill and Taffy's song rambled into American culture.
• 2:30
  Country roads, take me home And then traveled way beyond...
• 2:38
  to British football terraces, karaoke bars in Germany, Croatian nightclubs and the soundtrack of a movie that helped embed it in the culture of Japan and into its country roads.
• 2:52
  Literally.
• 3:04
  I'm Rico Gagliano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast.
• 3:07
  MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema.
• 3:09
  On this show, we tell you the stories behind great cinema.
• 3:12
  Today we are launching Season 11, or at least giving you a first taste of it.
• 3:17
  We're calling it, Needle on the Record - Side Two.
• 3:19
  This is a sequel to our season a couple of years back, where we dove deep into the grooves of great movie needle drops, those moments when filmmakers take a tune, drop it in their movie, and magic happens.
• 3:30
  After today, we're gonna spin you a few of those golden oldie episodes, in case you missed them.
• 3:35
  Stories about everything from the '80s alt rock of Donnie Darko... It was the second day of photography, and here I was devoting the entire first half of the day to this music video with Tears for Fears.
• 3:45
  ...to the time Stanley Kubrick paired spaceships with Strauss.
• 3:48
  How can you make such a movie with this high tech and futuristic stuff and use a Viennese waltz?
• 3:54
  I mean, give me a break.
• 3:56
  But then we're gonna get into new episodes and we've actually got one of those today.
• 4:00
  The tale of Whisper of the Heart, an animated 1995 classic from Japan's Studio Ghibli.
• 4:06
  A new 4K restoration of it is hitting North American Imax cinemas for one day next week, April 21st.
• 4:13
  And it is a movie practically built around multiple versions of, yes,Take Me Home, Country Roads, the favorite tune of the guy who wrote the film, the legendary Hayao Miyazaki.
• 4:24
  Even if he couldn't quite translate the lyrics.
• 4:28
  He said, "I have this lyric," and when I heard it, I thought it was terrible, so I told him, "I think it's terrible." And he said, "I agree." That is Mamiko Suzuki.
• 4:41
  She eventually got hired to rewrite Country Roads lyrics for the movie, and I talked to her, her father Toshio, who co-founded Studio Ghibli with Miyazaki and a bunch of others to learn how this flick injected a hymn to old timey West Virginia into the heart of modern Japan.
• 4:57
  I had a study abroad student, and he told me that it was part of the eighth grade curriculum in Japan.
• 5:03
  Doing what?
• 5:03
  What were they doing with it?
• 5:05
  Learning English.
• 5:07
  So listen up as we drop the needle on Whisper of the Heart.
• 5:18
  To really get this movie and the way it uses the song, you kind of need to understand what was going on in '90s Japan.
• 5:24
  So we're gonna start this story back then at a movie theater in the city of Kanazawa, where an undergrad exchange student named Rayna Denison was about to take in her first Miyazaki film with a standing room only crowd.
• 5:37
  Princess Mononoke was first released in cinemas and I went because someone told me there was this great animated movie.
• 5:47
  And I watched people stand for the whole of this two-hour-plus film and watched people just enraptured with it and thought, there's something so special here, it's worth finding out more about.
• 5:58
  Today, Rayna's a film professor at the UK's University of Bristol, specializing in Studio Ghibli flicks, which, in her exchange student days, were blowing up.
• 6:07
  When these films first started coming out over here, they would be touted as the, you know, the best of Japanese art, as if they were something like art cinema rather than popular blockbuster cinema.
• 6:17
  And of course, they're both in Japan.
• 6:20
  Part of the thing that was happening in the 1990s is their popularity was growing pretty much with each film, and they're breaking box office records in Japan, pretty much every time one of their films comes out.
• 6:32
  It's not hard to imagine one reason why, to me anyway, the studio's humane, poetic fantasies feel like a balm for the soul.
• 6:40
  And in the '90s, Japan was going through some stuff.
• 6:44
  The world's fastest rising currency has turned Tokyointo a capital of glamour and glitz. See, I grew up in the '80s, and this was the Japan I knew, a financial powerhouse, that for a minute had the boomingest economy on the planet and the excess to go with it.
• 7:02
  Restaurants here will whip up a little something for $500 a person.Service included.
• 7:06
  Dessert, $120 melonor a cake baked with gold and diamonds. It rivaled the US economy, actually, in the '86 comedy Gung Ho, an autoworker played by Michael Keaton, tries to save his failing US car factory by getting a Japanese company to take it over.
• 7:24
  Do you speak English?
• 7:24
  I'm just curious.We all speak English.
• 7:26
  Continue, please. But then, weeks before the start of the new decade, December 1989, Japan's stock market crashed.
• 7:35
  And within a few years, it was pretty clear the party was over.
• 7:38
  It was the start of what's called the Lost Decade.
• 7:42
  The bubble bursts.
• 7:43
  It's kind of the end of that seemingly endless dream of economic wealth and growth, and the whole country is kind of starting to have to think about other possible roads to the future.
• 7:54
  In the middle of which, around '92 or 3, Miyazaki started planning a movie that was gonna end up speaking to that moment, while also telling colleagues he was gonna take a new road himself.
• 8:05
  He was retiring.That was it. He was done.He was done directing films.
• 8:10
  He wasn't going to do that again. That is former Pixar animation boss John Lasseter in a 2006 interview aired on Turner Classic Movies.
• 8:19
  And look, Miyazaki has threatened to retire tons of times for good reason.
• 8:24
  He just refuses to delegate the hard stuff.
• 8:27
  I mean, making these animated films is a real... Is very difficult.You know, it's difficult for us, but especially difficult for Miyazaki-sanbecause he writes and storyboards, everything.And so when he gets done with a film, it's like,"That's it, I'm done, I'm done."He keeps telling me,"That's it, the last one I make." But this time it seemed like he might actually follow through, when he announced his next flick would be written by him but for the first time, directed by a protege, Yoshifumi Kondō, an animator who'd been grinding for Ghibli directors for years.
• 8:58
  Long suffering is probably a good word because he works with Takahata and Miyazaki, and both of them make him work very hard, very long hours.
• 9:07
  But he seems to have been a genuinely easygoing, really nice person, from what I can tell.
• 9:12
  He's also someone who, again, is very devoted to animation though, someone who is willing to put in the time and the hours.
• 9:20
  And at first glance, the project, eventually titledWhisper of the Heart seemed more up his alley than Miyazaki's.
• 9:30
  So it's based on a manga from a girls magazine called Ribon.
• 9:35
  Miyazaki came across the second part of it, and Yoshifumi Kondō, who he gave the idea to, was interested in producing something that linked really closely to reality, which is a bit of a departure for Studio Ghibli at this time.
• 9:49
  This one was going to be much more of an everyday story of two young people falling in love.
• 9:54
  Miyazaki grew up in a family whose company made airplane parts.
• 9:58
  His movies and his characters constantly fly.
• 10:02
  There are teen witches cruising around on broomsticks, castles in the sky.
• 10:06
  But this manga and Kondō's vision was mostly grounded in the actual streets of a neighborhood in Tokyo called Tama New Town.
• 10:14
  Yeah, if you're watching it now and you'd been in Japan in the 1990s, it would feel like you're being transported back in time.
• 10:20
  You could go, "Oh yeah, that is exactly where that building was"and that's exactly the sign that was on it." Those adverts are correct.
• 10:27
  Like all the signage in it, all the types of media you see in the backgrounds, all of them are drawn direct from life.
• 10:34
  But beneath the street level surface in the movie's story, Miyazaki is definitely there sending what he might have been thinking was a last message to his post-bubble audience, even when reality's tough to aim for the sky and sing your own tune.
• 10:51
  Whisper of the Heart's hero is Shizuku, a 14-year-old living in a cramped new town apartment with her folks.
• 10:57
  Hey, I'm home! And with her grumpy older sister, a college kid.
• 11:01
  - Oh hey, Sis, you're back early.
• 11:01
  - Oh. I'm beat. Who pretty much never stops reminding Shizuku what's expected of her.
• 11:09
  You're gonna have big problems if you slack off,just because Dad and Mom don't bug you about it.I'm studying, okay? Except she doesn't really study so much.
• 11:17
  Instead, she dreams of writing stories.
• 11:20
  Shizuku, time to put the books away and go to bed.Okay, Dad. Good night. And daydreaming about a mysterious boy whose name keeps showing up in the borrowers cards in her library books.
• 11:31
  Here it is again, Seiji Amasawa.
• 11:31
  That's amazing.This guy checked out all these books before I did.Seiji Amasawa, huh?What kind of person are you?
• 11:42
  I wonder if we're anything alike. Spoiler alert, she meets Seiji Amasawa, and at first they don't seem alike.
• 11:51
  In fact, he's kind of a jerk to her.
• 11:53
  But then they realize they're both not big on what society expects of them.
• 11:58
  Seiji wants to drop out of school and learn how to handcraft violins in Italy.
• 12:03
  But I don't know if I'll get to do it.I fight with my parents about it every day.Even if I get to go, it doesn't mean that I'll be any good at it.I'll just have to do my best and find out. This really is a film that's kind of trying to resist that pull towards the norm.
• 12:19
  Typical of Miyazaki, he's asking for a more thoughtful, anti-consumerist approach to life.
• 12:26
  So we get the very angry older sister who's doing all the things she's supposed to do and seems very unhappy doing them at the same time as Shizuku and Seiji are quite happy trying to do new and different things.
• 12:39
  There are moments where you can practically hear Miyazaki talking through the characters right to his Lost Decade audience, saying, "Yeah, the decadent old days are over.
• 12:49
  "There are other roads...
• 12:50
  See ya."...Take a chance."Shizuku, you're a very talented writer.You should keep pursuing it.
• 12:57
  It's not a waste of time. And that finally brings us to a song about roads that almost from the beginning of the movie, our heroine seems strangely determined to rewrite.
• 13:14
  Looking over a sprawling cityHow I do yearn for hills and clouds so pretty That's Shizuku's first stab at it from an early scene.
• 13:24
  But Country Roads shows up over and over again with different words played in different musical styles. In fact...
• 13:31
  Interestingly, in the promotional materials for the film, they talk about Country Roads being the second gensaku or original work that the film is based on.
• 13:41
  - Oh, as well as the manga.
• 13:41
  - As well as the manga, yeah.
• 13:44
  So it's given an almost equal footing to the original manga in terms of adaptation sources.
• 13:50
  Before I ask why, I want to know how.
• 13:53
  How did this piece of '70s Americana even roll onto these filmmakers radar?
• 13:58
  Turns out the road it took from Bill Danoff's guitar to Tokyo...
• 14:02
  is twisty.
• 14:06
  I'm gonna flash us back to 1970 again and a night at Bill and Taffy Nivert's house in Washington, DC.
• 14:12
  They were hanging out with an old friend and fellow folk act, a guy with glasses, blond mop top, and a plaster cast on his thumb.
• 14:19
  John Denver.
• 14:21
  See, they'd all just played a club gig together, and on his drive to Bill and Taffy's afterwards.
• 14:26
  Somebody rammed into the back of the car and John went into the windshield and put his hand up and broke his thumb.
• 14:33
  And we're all sitting there doing the kinds of things we did in the '70s to relax after traumatic events, which involved smoking stuff and drinking beers.
• 14:44
  And John said, "Let's play something." Bill and Taffy played him a nascent version of Country Roads. And as much as you might like the song, you can probably imagine how much even better it gets after smoking stuff and drinking.
• 14:59
  Denver punched up a few of the lyrics and...
• 15:01
  We tried it out at the club the next night.
• 15:04
  John still had the broken thumb so he can't play the guitar, and the people clapped for about five minutes straight.
• 15:10
  I never saw anything like it or heard anything like it.
• 15:13
  We did it the next show, there were two shows a night, we did it the next show, same thing.
• 15:18
  And John had a wonderful capacity and proclivity to get very excited about things.
• 15:24
  "Oh my gosh, that's a hit.
• 15:24
  That's a hit song.
• 15:27
  "Did you record it?" And I said,"No, we don't have a record deal." And he said, "Well, I got a record deal." The response to the record, same as in the clubs.
• 15:39
  As soon as the records started coming off, we started hearing these stories about it.
• 15:44
  I mean, almost right away.
• 15:45
  I remember this was probably the first month, there was a story about a Greyhound bus driver from West Virginia who was on his way to Florida, and Country Roads came on, he turned the bus around and went back to West Virginia.
• 15:58
  You'd hear weird shit about the song having this effect on people.
• 16:02
  Denver's label, RCA, smelled a monster hit, the kind that could move units anywhere.
• 16:08
  There was just one problem.
• 16:10
  They wanted to release it worldwide, but they didn't think John could do it.
• 16:17
  John was not known around the world.
• 16:19
  He wasn't even known in the United States.
• 16:21
  It was his first chart record.
• 16:23
  So from the very release of the song, there are all these different covers.
• 16:28
  They just started distributing it to all kinds of artists all over the charts.
• 16:34
  That's Sarah Morris, she's a coordinator and assistant professor of English at West Virginia University.
• 16:39
  And she just published a book last October calledLessons from"Take Me Home, Country Roads." Sarah says RCA farmed the tune out to big US country acts first.
• 16:48
  Loretta Lynn, Lynn Anderson, Tennessee Ernie Ford, The Statler Brothers, they all recorded covers within the first year of the song's release.
• 16:59
  And then Ray Charles did an R&B cover which is Bill Danoff's favorite.
• 17:07
  Almost Heaven, West Virginia Very soulful and wonderful.
• 17:13
  So we see Charles's version having influence, like the Toots and the Maytals version.
• 17:19
  Almost Heaven, West Jamaica And we know that those directly trace because the chorus and the bridge are juxtaposed right there.
• 17:30
  They're switched just like in Charles's version.
• 17:33
  So that's pretty cool.
• 17:34
  But then, most germane to our story, came the third in what Morris calls the Holy Trinity of Country Roads covers sung by an angelic voice from Down Under.
• 17:43
  Country RoadsTake Me home RCA artist Olivia Newton-John.
• 17:53
  So that's on her albumLet Me Be There, which I think was her third studio album, and it went all over the world.
• 18:02
  How far?
• 18:03
  On his honeymoon in Croatia over 15 years later, Bill Danoff heard a hotel band cover Country Roads and introduced himself to them as the song's co-writer.
• 18:12
  Word must have got around the place because...
• 18:14
  The next day I'm walking by the front desk and the guy calls me over.
• 18:18
  So the guy says to me, he says,"You write the Country Road song." And I said, "Yeah." He said, "What's Olivia Newton-John like?"Almost heaven, West Virginia Sarah Morris says Olivia's cover was top 20 in the UK and top ten in Japan.
• 18:37
  It's almost definitely the versionWhisper of the Heart's filmmakers would have heard in their youth, which might explain why it's her version plays during the movie's opening credits.
• 18:46
  Ironically, over shots of noisy super non-country Tokyo.
• 18:50
  Take me home to the place I belong But why have the hero obsess over it?
• 19:01
  If you ask the movie's producer, Toshio Suzuki, like a lot of things, on this, Miyazaki went with his gut.
• 19:08
  Miyazaki loves listening to music.
• 19:11
  Even if he doesn't understand the lyrics, he feels the music.
• 19:15
  And this was the case with Country Road. To him, this was what young people's music sounded like.
• 19:23
  But it was going to take an actual young person to make the lyrics make sense in the middle of the Lost Decade.
• 19:29
  Mamiko Suzuki takes Country Roads for a spin and makes a complete U-turn.
• 19:34
  That's coming up in just a minute.
• 19:34
  Stay with us.
• 19:37
  Take me homeCountry roads Alright, everybody.
• 19:47
  MUBI is the global film company that champions great cinema, bringing it to you wherever you are, in as many ways as we possibly can.
• 19:54
  We produce movies, we distribute them in cinemas, movies from any country made by legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers.
• 20:00
  We've always got something new for you to discover.
• 20:03
  And oh, the discoveries we've got for you if you're into animation, which, if you weren't before you started this episode, I hope you are by now.
• 20:10
  We have put together a bunch of gems on our platform, and we're calling it Drawn to Life: Animated Films.
• 20:16
  One of the standouts I think you're gonna be excited about is called Yuki's Sun. This is a five minute short Hayao Miyazaki made 13 years before co-founding Studio Ghibli.
• 20:27
  It was kind of a miniature pilot for a TV series And even bite sized, his work just soars with compassion.
• 20:34
  We've got that streaming almost globally.
• 20:36
  And if you're in the UK or Ireland, we've got Flow. That is the dialog-less movie about a cat on a wild adventure.
• 20:44
  It won the Oscar for Best Animated Feature a couple years back, and a cat plays a major role in Whisper of the Heart, actually, so maybe this would be a good double feature.
• 20:52
  Anyway, there's lots more where those came from.
• 20:54
  Once again, we're calling this series, Drawn to Life, and you can start watching by subscribing to MUBI at mubi.com We've got all the info and links you need in the show notes of this episode.
• 21:05
  Speaking of which, let's get back to the episode.
• 21:09
  So is that a real violin you're making?Oh yeah. So there's a moment about midway through Whisper of the Heart with the movie's heroine, Shizuku.
• 21:19
  It's one of the most charming things I've ever seen.
• 21:22
  And Rayna Denison's with me on that.
• 21:24
  So there's a wonderful scene where she goes to visit Seiji in his workshop.
• 21:28
  And, you know, she asks if he can play the violins that he's trying to make and he's like, "A bit. I'm alright." And then he gets out this violin and starts to play an absolutely gorgeous version ofCountry Roads. And she, Shizuku, sings the lyrics that she has adapted and translated in Japanese.
• 22:00
  And suddenly, out of nowhere appear all of his grandpa's friends.
• 22:05
  And for some reason, one of them has a recorder. It's brilliant.
• 22:08
  And so you have this amazing version of Country Roads that is done in this kind of mixed classical folk style, which is just great.
• 22:21
  Rayna and I aren't special, this is everyone's favorite scene.
• 22:25
  So it's surprising to learn the lyrics Shizuku sings, which as you'll hear in a minute, are kind of the soul of the whole movie, came together at the last possible second.
• 22:36
  With a scene like this, we'd usually pre score.
• 22:39
  We'd record the music first and then animate to the beats of the song and the lyrics, etc.
• 22:45
  That's Toshiya Suzuki again, and he says, at first Miyazaki, true to form, was determined to write those lyrics himself, but as the recording day loomed...
• 22:54
  He was really struggling with the translation.
• 22:56
  I tried to push him to just keep going, but he was really frustrated and he'd say,"It makes no sense that I write it." One day he approaches me and goes,"Let's have Mamiko-chan write the lyrics." At the time, Toshio's daughter Mamiko was 18 years old, taking a year off before college, working at a karaoke bar, and she says she was not the obvious choice to give a writing gig to.
• 23:25
  So my father approached me out of the blue.
• 23:28
  I did actually write poems back then, but my father probably didn't know about it.
• 23:34
  Or maybe, I don't know.
• 23:38
  But if he didn't, why offer you the job?
• 23:41
  So he told me was the protagonist was a teenage girl.
• 23:45
  So Miyazaki wanted a teenage girl to write this lyric.
• 23:52
  And even though she'd never heardCountry Roads, at the time, she was way into like, Guns N' Roses, she didn't feel much pressure, especially when she heard Miyazaki's stabs at it.
• 24:04
  He said, "I have this lyric," and when I heard it, I thought it was terrible, so I told him, "I think it's terrible." And he said, "I agree." Miyazaki is a big environmentalist, and his lyrics turn the song into a lament about paving over nature.
• 24:23
  You actually still hear it at one point in the movie, but cueing off Mamiko's criticism, Miyazaki has Shizuku and a friend sarcastically make fun of it.
• 24:31
  My hometown's down concrete roadLet's sing that. But when Mamiko finally sat down to take her own stab at Country Roads' lyrics, she realized it wasn't going to be easy for her either.
• 24:49
  So I knew the ask, right?
• 24:51
  So I knew that it was supposed to be a lyric written by a teenage girl.
• 24:56
  But when I heard the music, the only thing that came up was I got this image of a boy walking this riverside road.
• 25:07
  So I was struggling and trying to come up with something that would tell a story of a teenage girl.
• 25:15
  So she procrastinated, with the recording date now bearing down on her.
• 25:20
  And then my father came to me and told me that it's the deadline.
• 25:23
  So do you have the lyric?
• 25:25
  And so I wrote it almost on the spot.
• 25:30
  I understand, so you wrote how fast?
• 25:31
  Like, you know, an hour.
• 25:34
  So according to my father, I wrote it in five minutes in front of him.
• 25:39
  Toshio didn't mind though.
• 25:41
  For him, this was all a way to cure Miyazaki of writer's block.
• 25:44
  Maybe give him something to punch up.
• 25:48
  However her version turned out, it would at least move things forward.
• 25:51
  But then when I showed him the finished product, he just goes, "Good, let's use it." Which makes sense, because Mimiko's lyric is almost the opposite of the original and it's totally perfect.
• 26:10
  See on first listen, anyway, the original Country Roads is about straight up nostalgia, longing to go back to your old hometown and a familiar life.
• 26:19
  But Mamiko's lyrics are about feeling that pull and then having the courage not to go back.
• 26:31
  Even if this road leads all the way back to my hometown, she sings.
• 26:35
  I won't go there. I can't go there.
• 26:39
  So around that time, a lot of my friends, they came to Tokyo from like a rural area or the countryside, you know, they are striving.
• 26:50
  And I grew up in Tokyo.
• 26:50
  I was born and raised in Tokyo.
• 26:53
  So those friends to me, I really looked up to, you know, they were more independent and they seemed to be more stronger than me.
• 27:03
  So I think I had those friends in mind when I thought about Country Road, like them trying to let go of that road that would lead back to their home to achieve their dreams.
• 27:20
  For a movie about resilience and forging ahead, it was the perfect sentiment.
• 27:24
  Even if during recording, Miyazaki got cold feet, suddenly worried that it almost seemed like an ode to teenage runaways.
• 27:33
  Miyazaki-san felt it was a little too dark and tried to change it.
• 27:38
  And Yoshifumi Kondō, who was the director, really objected.
• 27:42
  He liked it because of that.
• 27:44
  It turned into a huge blow up, and later on I learned why.
• 27:48
  Kondō-san grew up in Niigata Prefecture, a few hours outside of Tokyo.
• 27:53
  It turns out he was a runaway himself, and that's how he arrived in Tokyo in the first place.
• 27:59
  That's why he was so taken with Mamiko-chan's lyrics.
• 28:03
  Learning this, I found myself very moved.
• 28:08
  Mamiko was moved too when she saw the final product on a DVD her dad brought home, and she realized how many times her lyrics kept popping up.
• 28:19
  I was wondering whether,"Okay, are they actually going"to use this lyric in the ending theme of the film?" And then they did.
• 28:26
  And what happened?
• 28:29
  What happened in your mind at that moment?
• 28:31
  I was so surprised. I was crying.
• 28:34
  Maybe I'm biased, but I thought it was a wonderful song.
• 28:40
  And so did the rest of Japan.
• 28:48
  Yoko Honna, the voice actress who plays Shizuku actually recorded it.
• 28:53
  It's her version you hear in the end credits sequence, and that adaptation became a hit.
• 28:58
  There's also swing and jazz versions that have been made and released in Japan.
• 29:03
  There's over 20 different versions, though, that have been adapted since the movie came out.
• 29:08
  In fact, Sarah Morris says as much as Olivia Newton-John may have brought Country Roads to Japan back in 1973.
• 29:14
  I think it retained its popularity over time because it was featured inWhisper of the Heart. I was in Japan as part of a teacher exchange program in the mid 2000s and when I said I was from West Virginia, people would say,"Oh, Country Roads." Or I was in a middle school, and the middle school marching band comes stomping out playing Country Roads. And I started to cry.
• 29:43
  I was like, "What is wrong with me?
• 29:43
  This is so beautiful." And since the late '00s in Fukushima Prefecture on Japan's east coast, you can drive Country Roads. Grooves cut into the pavement on National Route 252 play the song as your car's wheels roll over it.
• 30:00
  Seriously, here's a guy doing it on YouTube.
• 30:11
  Alas, Yoshifumi Kondō didn't get to experience any of this.
• 30:16
  Whisper of the Heart was Japan's biggest hit of 1995.
• 30:19
  Just over two years later, he died.
• 30:22
  He was 47.
• 30:23
  He suffered an aortic aneurysm.
• 30:26
  It was a very unexpected death, and it really rocked the studio because he was the person that Miyazaki, Takahata as well were looking to to be the future of Studio Ghibli.
• 30:37
  And there was all kinds of controversy around his death that just the sheer workload of making an animated movie is very taxing.
• 30:45
  And so there was a lot of back and forth between the top team at Ghibli about working practices.
• 30:51
  There was also a lot of grief.
• 30:54
  So they did a farewell party to celebrate his life.
• 30:58
  And so many people were devastated.
• 31:01
  And I was invited to that farewell party because they were going to playCountry Road. But at that time, my relationship with my father wasn't that great.
• 31:13
  So I declined the invitation and I just hung out with my friends.
• 31:20
  Do you regret it?
• 31:20
  Do you wish you'd gone?
• 31:25
  I have been regretting it all my life.
• 31:32
  It got me thinking about that song,Country Roads and how it somehow makes total sense anywhere, in any form.
• 31:41
  In Whisper of the Heart it's played by teens and their grandparents as a pop tune and a folk tune.
• 31:47
  Manchester United fans sing it like a hopeful hymn before kickoff.
• 31:52
  Bill Danoff says American soldiers latched on to it under fire in Vietnam.
• 31:57
  Ghibli's animators played it at their friend's wake.
• 32:01
  How does it do that?
• 32:04
  Sarah Morris says she asked herself the same question.
• 32:07
  Like, why?
• 32:07
  Why this song? What is it?
• 32:11
  And one of the core concepts that I settled on is, it's a Welsh concept called Hiraeth, which is this idea that we have this existential longing for a home that doesn't exist.
• 32:28
  And I think there's something about Country Roads that captures that feeling of belonging of imagined place.
• 32:37
  And that's exactly what's happening in the movie, right?
• 32:41
  These two young people trying to find their path to get to this place that doesn't exist yet.
• 32:46
  And that's every coming-of-age story.
• 32:50
  We don't know where we're going, but we know we wanna go somewhere, and that somewhere is gonna feel like home when we get there.
• 33:02
  And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week.
• 33:05
  A new restoration ofWhisper of the Heart hits North American Imax cinemas for one day next week, April 21st.
• 33:11
  You know what to do.
• 33:12
  Meanwhile, follow us to hear more stories about great music and great movies.
• 33:17
  Next time, with <i: 2001>A Space Odyssey, Stanley Kubrick made classical music a sci-fi staple, but it could have gone a different way.
• 33:25
  Next time, with <i: 2001>At one point, Kubrick said,"Maybe I should contact The Beatles." Follow us so you don't miss it.
• 33:30
  Next time, with <i: 2001>While you're at it, do leave us a five star review, wherever you listen, let the world know we're not your standard movie chat show.
• 33:36
  Next time, with <i: 2001>And if you've got questions, comments, or just want to hit me with some anime trivia, email us, the address is podcast@mubi.com And now let's roll credits.
• 33:45
  Next time, with <i: 2001>This episode was written, hosted and edited by me, Rico Gagliano.
• 33:49
  Next time, with <i: 2001>Ciara McEniff is our producer along with assistant producer Kat Kowalczyk.
• 33:53
  Next time, with <i: 2001>Jackson Musker is our booking producer.
• 33:55
  Next time, with <i: 2001>Mastering by Stephen Colon.
• 33:56
  Next time, with <i: 2001>Our beautiful original music was composed by Martin Austwick.
• 33:59
  Next time, with <i: 2001>Huge thanks this week to everyone at GKids.
• 34:02
  Next time, with <i: 2001>Yuko Banno for interpreting for the Suzukis and voicing Mamiko, and to Takaya Suzawa who voiced Toshio.
• 34:09
  Next time, with <i: 2001>The show is executive produced by me along with Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca.
• 34:14
  Next time, with <i: 2001>And finally, to watch the best in cinema, subscribe to mubi@mubi.com Thanks for listening.
• 34:21
  Next time, with <i: 2001>Now go watch some movies.