TJE 7/7 – From Up on Poppy Hill (2011)

"From Up on Poppy Hill" should have been Goro Miyazaki's first feature, a simple, small-scale teenage romance that takes place sometime in early 1960s Yokohama. After the high profile failure of the fantasy epic "Tales From Earthsea," I wouldn't have been surprised if he had quit directing entirely. But here we are six years later, and Goro Miyazaki has directed his second Studio Ghibli feature, with his father Hayao Miyazaki taking over scripting duties. It's a much better outing for him on every level.

Sixteen year-old Umi looks after Coquelicot Manor, a boarding house on a high hill that overlooks the harbor. Her father died in the Korean war and her mother is away, leaving Umi to look after her grandmother, younger siblings, and the various boarders. She raises a pair of signal flags every morning, and one day she gets a response, in the form of a poem in the school paper. Umi suspects that the author of the poem is Shun, an older schoolmate who works on the school paper, and is spearheading a campaign to stop the Tokyo Olympic committee from tearing down the school's beloved clubhouse building. As Umi and Shun spend more time together, they start to fall in love. However, Shun discovers that he and Umi might be siblings, complicating the situation.

Unlike most of Ghibli's work, "Poppy Hill" has no fantastical or fanciful elements at all, and so the animation seems rather subdued compared to their other films, full of monsters and spirits and talking cats. It almost begs the question why a film like this should be animated at all, except that the visuals are still delightful to look at, and the story benefits greatly from the exaggeration of characters' facial features and the soft abstraction of the pastoral scenery. When the kids are cleaning out the cluttered clubhouse, the hand-drawn piles of junk topple in delightfully cartoonish fashion, and the scenes of rowdy crowds of schoolboys happily ignore traditional physics. Why shouldn't a story like this be told through animation? I would gladly watch Umi making breakfast for the movie's whole ninety-minute running time, because it's just executed so well.

Where the film really excels is with the characterization of the kids. Umi and Shun fit the mold of your usual Miyazaki protagonists and feel a little derivative, Shun especially. However, "Poppy Hill" spends the time to develop the pair nicely and dig into what makes them both tick. And their emotional states are rendered so well through traditional animation, you can't help but get caught up in their problems. When Shun starts ignoring Umi at school you can see the hurt and confusion on her face, though her face is composed of only a few simple ink lines. And it's this emotional reality, more than any magical creatures, more than any eye-popping fantasy wonderlands, that is one of the most crucial components of the Ghibli movies. It was a quality I found sorely missing from "Tales From Earthsea," and I'm so relieved that Goro Miyazaki seems to have gotten a handle on his characterization here.

For instance, my favorite scenes take place in the boarding house, where we get a gaggle of minor characters who really don't matter much to the plot, but are established as such full, interesting personalities in only a few minutes of screen time. There's Sachiko, the awkward art student, and Doctor Hokuto, who works the late shift at the local hospital, and Umi's hungry little brother Riku, and Umi's grandmother, the only one who wonders aloud if Umi may be taking on too much work in her mother's absence. They help to fill out the film's universe, to give it more texture and provide Umi with some support when things get rough for her. In other hands, so many extra minor characters could have been too overwhelming, or come across as cameos that were included for the benefit of the source material's original fans. Hayao Miyazaki, however, has always gotten the balance right, and I really hope this is a sign that the younger Miyazaki has picked it up as well.

I'm afraid that no matter how you look at it, "From Up on Poppy Hill" isn't one of the better Ghibli features. It's roughly on the same level of the more low-key obscurities in their catalog that cover similar thematic ground, like Tomomi Mochizuki's "Ocean Waves" or Isao Takahata's "Only Yesterday." The story is simply too rote and perfunctory, and there's some of that oddly didactic speechifying that has been popping up in Hayao Miyazaki's most recent output. However, this is an important stepping stone for Goro Miyazaki's future career as a director. This is a mediocre film, not a bad one, and a mediocre Ghibli film is still miles beyond what most animation outfits produce.

The studio has been in a tough transitional phase for the last few years, but after this film and Hiromasa Yonebayashi's "Arrietty," I think things are looking up. Though Hayao Miyazaki's shadow still looms very large, we're starting to get a decent picture of how Ghibli might look without him, and that's vital for the studio's future. I look forward to it.
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