Featuring the voices of Sara Takatsuki and Kasumi Arimura. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable.

Bittersweet, female-centric nostalgia is the core of much Japanese animation, and certainly of Studio Ghibli’s output. The outfit is best known for Hayao Miyazaki masterworks like Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service, but there has been similar-toned work from the younger Hiromasa Yonebayashi, one of Miyazaki’s key animators.

The latter’s previous directorial effort, The Secret World of Arietty, was adapted from The Borrowers, and here he returns to young-adult fiction from England, for an adaptation of Joan G. Robinson’s 1967 novel. Yonebayashi’s take moves the action to Sapporo, where 12-year-old Anna (voiced by Sara Takatsuki) keeps to herself, preferring to draw rather than make friends or spend time with her foster parents.

When Anna has a particularly bad asthma attack, she’s sent to stay with “relatives” in a remote fishing hamlet, where she initially feels just as out of place. The girl has issues. But she’s gradually won over by her bucolic summer days, and becomes fascinated with a waterfront mansion that appears abandoned.

Then she spies a slightly older girl with long, blond hair, and forms an instant, very intense bond with Marnie (Kasumi Arimura), who lives in the old, western-style house with her glamorous parents, seemingly lifted intact from the 1920s, as well as a bullying grandmother and creepy maids.

It’s pretty obvious that this Eurasian girl and her odd demimonde might be dreamy apparitions, or worse. But to Anna, who has short, brown hair and anomalous blue eyes, even a fantasy friendship can hold keys to questions about her own tortured origins. This may sound pretty dark, but the settings are so lovely—you’ve never seen such beautifully animated water—and the pace is so leisurely, especially by Disney standards, most viewers will be happy to join Anna’s journey.

By the way, the English-dubbed version of this emotionally satisfying feature—purported to be the last Ghibli release, following Miyazaki’s retirement—plays just twice, on Sunday and Tuesday (May 31 and June 2). True Grit’s Hailee Steinfeld voices Anna and Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka is Marnie. Some sense of the search for Japanese identity will be lost, certainly, but you can’t go wrong with a cast that also includes Geena Davis, Catherine O’Hara, and John C. Reilly.