National Post (National Edition)
FROM UP ON POPPY HILL
In Studio Ghibli’s latest offering,
From Up on Poppy Hill, the quirky fantasy world of the Japanese animation collective is replaced by a needlessly melodramatic dose of reality. Set in 1960s Japan, Goro Miyazaki’s second feature film centres on a budding romance between schoolgirl Umi Matsuzaki and a classmate with whom she shares a special but disconcerting connection. The studio’s stunning textures and vibrant details still give Poppy
Hill that ethereal quality sure to mollify nostalgic Ghibli fans, but its strengths are fastidiously undone by a predictable and underwhelming plot.
Based on the Japanese comic of the same title, Poppy Hill’s characters have an unflappable modus operandi: You can’t move into the future without understanding the past. For Umi (voiced by Sarah Bolger), this is particularly true. The Yokohama teen is haunted by the memory of her father, a sea captain who died when his vessel was struck during the Korean War. Every day, in the hope that he might have survived, she raises flags from her home on Poppy Hill, signalling a way back.
One day, during a bustling lunch hour at her high school, she meets the handsome Shun (Anton Yelchin). There’s an instant spark between the two that only grows when they unite to save the school clubhouse, which is on the chopping block due to the looming 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In a heated school meeting, club members accuse
‘It’s a shame the film lacks the balance between visuals and story’
school administration of being “just like the old men who run [Japan]. Out with the old and in with the new.” The Olympics and the inevitable gentrification of Yokohama is one of Poppy Hill’s more absorbing storylines, but never figures as prominently as it ought to.
Instead, the film gets its most interesting images when students set out to renovate the dilapidated clubhouse into a gleaming bastion of culture worth preserving. The makeover drives Umi and Shun even closer, but everything mysteriously changes when she reveals a photo of her father. Shun’s reaction is inexplicable to her (though painfully transparent to us) and what was once a promising romance rapidly dissolves. Indeed, the outcome of the photo is something straight out of daytime television — even Shun reflects on his situation as “a cheap melodrama” — and the future the couple once envisioned quickly becomes unthinkable.
Given the venerable screenwriting team of Hayao Miyazaki (Goro’s father and co-founder of Studio Ghibli) and Keiko Niwa, whose most recent effort was 2010’s sublime Secret World of Arrietty, it’s a shame Poppy Hill lacks the balance between visuals and story which made that film such a success. Instead, rather than using the kaleidoscopic colours and lifelike sceneries that have always been Ghibli’s strength to reinforce characters and their relationships, the studio’s signature aesthetics are wasted on a half-baked story that never really calls for them in the first place. ≥≤