After the credits rolled on Mary and the Witch's Flower there was an interview with director Yonebayashi Hiromasa and producer Nishimura Yoshiaki reflecting on their first film as Studio Ponoc, their new home outside the Ghibli nest. Nishimura started by sharing the origin of the name Ponoc, which is Croatian for “midnight” as a symbol of the new day to come. Nishmura and Yonebayashi, having worked together on Ghibli's final film When Marnie was There, had left Ghibli in hopes of starting from scratch, bringing a fresh new day to the legacy of the legendary studio.
It was an odd way to start an interview following a movie that lives and breathes Ghibli's style in every way, shape, and form. From the unmistakable character designs to the blending of science and magic to the lush rural backdrop, it's hard not to immediately think of Kiki's Delivery Service, Ponyo, and also Yonebayashi's directorial debut The Secret World of Arrietty. But even with a Ghibli flair and a lot of heart—Yonebayashi and Nishimura end the interview reflecting on how they hope children around the world will find courage in times of anxiety through Mary's headstrong refusal to give up—there's a lot missing at the core of Mary and the Witch's Flower, like a kid recounting his favorite parts of those older Ghibli films and focusing only on the big moments without any of the smaller scenes to drive or connect them. It's a film about facing adversity without too much thought or anguish, a film about respecting the power of nature by showing curious scientists mess up the same way twice with no real explanation, and a film about learning to love yourself based on one packed day's worth of paranormal adventure.
Mary reminds me a lot of Shu from Now and Then, Here and There, being so unabashedly headstrong and unrelentingly persistent in daily life that we can almost believe how easily she slips into being unabashedly headstrong and unrelentingly persistent even in the fantastical new world of Endor College of magic. The opening third of the film serves mostly to establish her as someone with a lot to prove, failing at every basic task she forces people to let her take part in, and we notice a complex she has about her red hair from her rocky introduction to the village boy Peter. Aside from setting up the plot with a battle in the sky between a red-haired witch and an army of formless magical beings on a floating island set aflame, Mary's discovery of a beautiful bunch of blue flower buds, and the disappearance of Peter's cat Gib, the first act is focused on acquainting us Mary, or at least acclimating us to her relentless attitude. At one point her family maid comments “you're supposed to look twice before leaping; she hardly looks at all.” Her complex aside, this line sums up Mary in a nutshell, although it might have been added to lend the rest of the film more credibility.
As one of the blue flowers breaks in her hand she suddenly finds herself whisked away by a forgotten broomstick in the forest, accompanied by the black cat Tib, and together they soar through the clouds and to Endor College. After all the pleasant but fairly nondescript forest backdrops, the sky scene and tour through the College are beautiful, both in terms of background designs and colorwork presumably handled by the great artists at Studio Pablo, and with the sudden density of high-quality animation that brought last year's Little Witch Academia to mind (for more than the subject matter). In general the blurry smears of Mary's frantic confused running were somewhat less cartooney and more functional, but particularly with the film pressing the College's unifying theme of transformation we see dozens of creatures and forms shifting and blurring. Of course there was a Ghibli legacy to inherit, with a forest of animals to rival Princess Mononoke, but this is more of a product of Mary and the Witch's Flower's impressive list of legendary animators like Ohira Shinya and Hashimoto Shinji, whose individual styles defined a lot of what we think of as the Ghibli magic dozens of times over. Unfortunately we don't get to explore this world too deeply; the last two thirds of the film take place in a single day after all. More to the heart of the problem however, for as much as the animation and backgrounds conspire to give Mary's adventure a sense of wonder, they do little to give her growth a sense of depth. She faces her obstacles with little or no question because that's just who she is, and really who she's always been. Her growth from the start of the film is that she's fairly successful for once.
Or perhaps that's not totally fair, as there's something to be said for what the film's antagonists bring out in her. There's a nice little irony in the two antagonists, the College's headmistress and head scientist, giving Mary the validation she needs to move past her self-doubt. Yonebayashi's villains have always been curious as opposed to evil, and for all their machinations this pair really do seem well-intentioned, even as it paves the road to hell and a few cataclysmic magical explosions. Having abused the blue flowers like a drug, Mary seems to have an innate sense of the danger of harnessing magic beyond humanity's control, validated in a bombastic but somewhat rushed climax where the two scientists lose control of their experiments as they did decades prior. Miyazaki Hayao practically made the studio's name off of this theme of humans controlling nature through technology only for the powers at be to bite back, but for him the powers at be always had a face, be it the deer god from Princess Mononoke or the Ohmu in Nausicaa in the Valley of the Wind. What really made Mary's climactic last moments feel most superficial, beyond a major plot point involving magic cancellation, is how the scientists seem to be wrong just because that's how things played out, without giving us any reason to believe they're actually so incompetent and misguided, or nature so vengeful, that their failure is inevitable. By the same token, her victory is less a triumph of her character than the luck of being on the right side of an accident.