Don't go to see the "new" Miyazaki film expecting a fantasy story: From Up on Poppy Hill has no witches, nor is it set in some mythical place with flying cities and humans who transform into beasts (or other magical creatures). based on a 1980 manga comic, the film, directed by Goro Miyazaki from a script co-authored by his father Hayao (who seems somewhat settled into retirement after directing so many of the masterpieces from Studio Ghibli), Poppy Hill looks back at a Japanese society trying to embrace its future place in the global scene while determining what elements of its past are important to maintain.
The setting is Yokohama, 1963, and nearby Tokyo is hosting next year's Olympics. (They are the second Axis power to host; Rome was awarded the games in 1960, and Munich will host in 1972.) Japan is modernizing in preparation, but the past is not so willing to step aside.
The film's plot, a bit too precious at that, centers around a teenage girl named Umi, who attends school but also manages her grandmother's boarding house: she prepares the morning and evening meals and makes sure the rents are paid. Her mother is in America studying medicine; her father's supply ship was destroyed in the Korean war. One of her daily tasks is to hoist the semaphore flags as a message to her father, hoping against hope that one day he will return. At school, she befriends Shun, a boy who is a year older (if memory serves me) and who is working very hard to preserve an old club building the boys have used for decades, known as the Latin Quarter. Shun is an editor of the school paper and uses that medium to spread the word about the coming demolition of the building in an attempt to organize protest against it. Umi urges the boys to clean the place up to show its historical significance, and she organizes the female students to help.
Yes, love blooms, an innocent, half-spoken one. The plot twists in a manner that is, as one of the two kids says, is an absurd melodrama, and that melodrama doesn't really come off all that well. (Just because you self-consciously acknowledge your story is a bit sickly-sweet doesn't mean you intend it to be ironic.) What is much more interesting in the film is the viewing of ordinary, daily life for the students, and for the boarders at Umi's home. One of them is an intern who leaves the house to work at a hospital in another town. Another is an artist who paints a seascape with a ship that flies the same flags that Umi hoists, leading to a minor mystery. The grandmother is not infirm, and she worries that perhaps Umi has too much responsibility, but it is also clear that Umi does her work out of deep respect for her elders. There are little scenes that fascinate, like one where Umi arrives late from school (having helped Shun out with preparing mock tests to be published by the paper) and asks her younger sister to go and buy some pork for the evening meal. She and her younger brother are watching tv with grandmother, and she simply says, but the program just started. And so Umi dashes off to the butcher.
Details like this, and the scenes of the smaller town of Yokohama and the big city of Tokyo (where Umi and Shun go to meet with the director of the school's board of trustees to persuade him not to destroy the clubhouse) give the viewer an insight to a culture looking forward with an eye to its past. Both the Korean war and the Second World War are evoked; one important reference is to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Nagasaki. There's no sudden appearance of a Totoro waiting for the bus, or a castle in the sky. And while Umi is referred to as the boys' clubs' "good luck goddess," she doesn't have special powers like the young witch-in-training Kiki. In order to appreciate From Up on Poppy Hill, you have to put aside its melodramatic plot and consider the relationships you see, between the characters, between the characters and their landscapes, and between the characters and their pasts. Through the eyes of the young students, we see a nation accepting its role on the global stage without completely forgetting what it has been.
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