From Up on Poppy Hill (reviews - page 2)
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Otaku USA
Kokuriko-zaka kara (From Up on Poppy Hill)
22 August 2011
New and Old Clash as Miyazakis Unite.
By Fernando Ramos
Goro Miyazaki has to be the unluckiest man in the anime industry. His legendary parentage aside, no one could envy his position of having been promoted from landscape architect to suddenly directing a movie based on an epic fantasy universe spanning a half-dozen books. That didn't stop the resulting film, 2006's Tales from Earthsea, from missing the mark, but all we can do is razz the movie and pat the director on the back while saying, “Maybe next time, kid” in our best Brooklyn accent. Apparently, the powers that be at Studio Ghibli also thought as much and so, after a five-year absence, have brought him back into the ring, this time tag-teaming with his old man Hayao Miyazaki for Kokuriko-zaka kara, or From Up on Poppy Hill.
As with last year's excellent Arrietty, Hayao relegates himself to planning and co-writing the script with Keiko Niwa, letting his son once again take seat in the director's chair, to the anxious (dare I say nervous) anticipation of filmgoers nationwide. Earthsea was the sad result of a young hungry filmmaker trying to prove his mettle in the heavyweight class and he could barely land a punch. It was only to be expected that that the son of Miyazaki would be given a second chance, but whether or not the kid could pull through remained to be seen.
The subtext of this father-son collaboration cannot be ignored by those who have followed or even been remotely aware of the tense relationship between the two Miyazakis. As the story goes, Goro took the directorial duties of Earthsea against the wishes of his father, leading the two to stop speaking to one another. If there is any positive result to be taken from that misfire, it was that it led to an apparent reconciliation, with the elder Miyazaki attending the premiere screening of his son's work and being one of the few to openly praise it. As if to completely bury that hatchet, the protagonist of 2009's Ponyo was said to be inspired by Goro in his younger years, complete with telling references to a busy father unable to meet his son due to always being out at sea.
Loosely based on a 1980 manga of the same name, Kokuriko-zaka kara ostensibly tells the love story between Umi (Masami Nagasawa) and Shun (Junichi Okada). Umi, nicknamed “Mer” by her friends and family, is just a girl growing up along the coasts of 1963 Yokohama, always hoisting up signal flags for the passing boats in memory of her late father, perhaps in a deliberate continuation of the similar subplot in Ponyo. Shun, who often rides a small tugboat of his own, makes a point to answer the signal, our heroine knowing not to whom it belongs.
However, the wheels of le romance finally get turning when Shun decides to confess his love in the most dramatic of ways, involving several loud banners, an even louder crowd of supporters, and a dive off the school's roof that predictably goes awry. At first, Umi spurns her aspiring suitor's advances as silly boys games, not realizing there might be something to it until she sees him give a stirring speech on keeping Quartier Latin, the school's dilapidated clubhouse, standing in the name of tradition while most students argue angrily that a changing new Japan needs new buildings. Making matters worse, their blossoming romance hits a huge obstacle when Umi learns something about Shun that perhaps only CLAMP would approve of.
Fans of Ghibli's more sedate works such as Only Yesterday, or even Arrietty, will feel right at home here, although this movie is perhaps a bit more outwardly melodramatic than either of those. The central relationship is more concretely defined and expressed, appropriate given that we're dealing with rambunctious high schoolers and not older adults nor sickly boys and faeries. However, this is a Japanese love story after all, so the kids mostly keep their hands off each other and expectations to hear “I love you” spoken will be in vain.
While the budding romance of the two protagonists is serviceable, the real star and the real story is the world of 1960s Japan herself. The roads are barely paved and the train lines are just being revitalized. Posters announcing the 1964 Tokyo Olympics are plastered everywhere and the opening of the Shinkansen bullet train is only a year away as the nation vigorously toils to shed the ashes of war and demonstrate itself as a reformed player on the world stage.
To wit, kids on shortwave radios excitedly make contact with American vessels in English and French-Japanese dictionaries adorn the desks and Umi's university professor mother is off in America for study. The air is filled with swanky jazz and period pop songs, most notably Kyu Sakamoto's "Ue o Muite Arukou" (better known as "Sukiyaki"), a Japanese international hit whose inclusion here is certainly no coincidence. This is a hopeful nation on the way to carving its identity while catching up with the big boys.
Thematic analysis aside, how does Goro fare his second time around in regards to creating a movie on its own merits? The idea to reel it way back to a smaller setting proves to be a wise one. The younger Miyazaki complements his father's writings with a much more careful hand than ventured in Earthsea. The narrative pace is meditative, never quite straying into boring but also not quite able to enrapture us in the characters' dilemmas.
Picking up the slack on that end are the visuals. To be sure, the movie doesn't toy much with camera tricks, preferring workmanlike static angles, but those shots are so crammed full of period details that they maintain interest and make one nostalgic for the era even if they never lived through it themselves.
As it stands, given its slow pace, niche material and director's bruised reputation, Kokuriko is bound to get overlooked as time wears on and, despite its flaws, that would be a shame. It's unlikely to ever be a classic, but it is a worthy addition to the Ghibli canon and a hell of a comeback for the maligned director. Here's hoping that he'll have a chance to truly knock it out on the third time around.
Fernando Ramos is a Japan correspondent for Otaku USA. His photography can be found at www.mroutside.com.
Red Ronin
6 October 2011
"From up on Poppy Hill" (Kokuriko-zaka kara) - Review
By David Vickers
Studio Ghibli is, in my opinion, the Japanese equivalent of Pixar, in that any film it releases comes with a virtually guaranteed seal of quality. The latest feature-length animation from the studio, "From Up on Poppy Hill," came out here in Japan this July, and I'm pleased to report that it maintains the high Ghibli standard.
This is the studio that recently brought us such family-friendly viewing delights as "Ponyo" (a kind of Japanese "Little Mermaid") and "Arietty" (a retelling of the classic children's story "The Borrowers"). However, I wouldn't recommended bringing your kids along to "From up on Poppy Hill," as it's squarely aimed at a more mature audience. Now, this doesn't mean it's the kind of anime that features scenes of blood-splattered violence or pneumatically-endowed naked bimbos (heaven forbid Ghibli ever goes down that route!). Rather, it's a deeply nostalgic coming-of-age tale that, while brimming with heart-warming charm, lacks the fantastical or cutesy element to keep the average kid entertained.
This is the second effort from director Goro Miyazaki, son of Hayao, the beloved founder of Ghibli. His directorial debut, "Tales from Earthsea" received a mixed critical reception, but so far "...Poppy Hill" has fared much better with Japanese critics and audiences, and deservedly so in my opinion, as overall it's a superior film.
Set in 1963, the Poppy Hill of the title is a picturesque part of Yokohama which overlooks the city's harbour. It's here that the 16 year-old heroine of the story, Umi, lives, in the grand family home Kokuriko Manor, from whose garden she diligently raises a flag each morning, bearing a message of "safe voyage" for passing ships. Umi feels a particular affinity with the sailors, as her own father died at sea in the Korean War.
The bulk of the story takes place in Umi's high school, which, even considering the 1960s setting, struck me as being a quaintly old-fashioned institution. The embodiment of this is the school's Culture Society, rather pretentiously named the "Quartier Latin," which is housed in a rickety old building that has certainly seen better days. With the Olympic Games set to be held in Tokyo the following year, the school authorities are keen to embrace the ideals of a new, modern Japan, and this apparently entails knocking down the Quartier Latin headquarters and replacing it with a shiny new structure. Many of the students are firmly against this drive for change, however, and chief among them is the earnest and eloquent Shun, a boy in the year above Umi. While campaigning together to try and save the old building, Umi and Shun feel themselves growing closer together, but, as they soon realize, young love rarely runs a smooth course...
There may not be many thrills and spills during the 90-minutes running time, but that didn't matter one bit to me. I came out of the cinema feeling all warm and fuzzy inside, which is not something that's happened to me for quite a while. The main cause of this was not so much the story, which was pleasant enough, but the whole look and feel of the film. This is almost entirely due to the sumptuous quality of the hand-drawn animation, with the settings of 1960s Yokohama and Tokyo recreated in such loving detail that I felt I was really back there myself. Even though I'm not Japanese, and have relatively little knowledge of the Japan of that era, I was left with a palpable sense of nostalgia, wishing that I could have grown up in Yokohama 50 years ago. The wonderfully atmospheric soundtrack also deserves a mention, a mixture of original instrumentals and Japanese '60s pop numbers contributing to the nostalgic feel.
So while, unlike many other Ghibli productions, "From up on Poppy Hill" doesn't feature any magic as such, it is nevertheless a magical film in itself, full of spellbinding images in the true Ghibli tradition that should stay with the viewer long after the credits have rolled.
Tangemania
15 July 2011
Review: Ghibli's From Up on Poppy Hill
By Aaron Gerow
For much of the postwar, it seemed that all too many Japanese cultural products were attempting to forget WWII, to hide either the trauma of defeat or aspects that were inconvenient to Japan’s emerging national narrative. Now a good 65 years after the end of the war, with the real trauma having faded - or the war having too effectively been forgotten – it today seems that it is the postwar that is the object of selective remembering and forgetting. As I argued in a recent article in Japan Focus, Yamato’s gruesome depiction of the war that functions to forget the postwar, or Always: Sunset on Third Street’s remembering the postwar through rose-colored glasses, are two sides of the same cultural effort to avoid dealing with what the postwar, and its history of the Cold War, American dominance, economic growth and its cost, and political turmoil, have meant for Japan.
The new Ghibli film, From Up on Poppy Hill (Kokuriko-zaka kara コクリコ坂から), is set around the same time as Always, in the years just preceding the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. This does a better job than that film at attempting to mix its nostalgia with the effort to remember history. Yet in the end it is an earnest but middling work that still somewhat selectively forgets the past.
Scripted by Miyazaki Hayao and directed by his son Goro, the film features several parallel stories, most of which focus on issues of memory and identity. The heroine, Umi, helps manage a small rooming house in Yokohama for her busy mother, while attending a nearby high school. Having lost her sea captain father during the Korean War, she raises signal flags every morning to pray for the safe passage of all the ships in the bay below. One who sees those flags is Shun, a year ahead of her in high school, who travels to school on a tug boat. It is their blossoming love – and the problem of their parentage – that serves as the central story.
The other main story is the effort of Shun and his classmates, including eventually Umi and her friends, to preserve the school’s old clubhouse, a once fine Meiji-era Western-style mansion, from demolition. Their rallying cry, uttered by the school council president, is the argument that tearing down historical artifacts is tantamount to erasing history.
For someone who has seen Japanese cities destroy much of their post-Meiji architecture, including many splendid old movie houses, I couldn’t agree with the sentiment more. A cultural policy that preserves pre-Meiji buildings while largely ignoring more modern artifacts has long been a means to define Japaneseness through tradition and thus as transcending – and in effect irrelevant to – the modern. That renders the modern unimportant to the nation, something that can be forgotten.
It is nice to see a film trying to defend something other than “good old Japan.” But if this is one of the messages of the film, it is an inconsistent one. From Up on Poppy Hill tries to preserve another historical relic: the student protest. But Miyazaki Hayao, who had contemplated filming the original manga for years, only decided to do it now because, as he says in the press notes, enough time had passed to enable depicting school protests through nostalgic eyes. This indicates that the preservation of history here is less an encounter with what is other to the present – that which can relativize and critique our world - than a present-day invention of the past through a projection of our images on history.
This becomes evident in the Yokohama presented here. While From Up on Poppy Hill has some of the attention to detail that made Arrietty memorable (see my review), that detail does not come down to the level of history. When I taught at Yokohama National University, I took my students on historical tours of Yokohama and always reminded them that this city and its port was strongly colored by an American military presence up until at least 1970. Yet none of those details appears in the film, as America is this film’s absent other (or absent father?). Talking of preserving a Western-style house in the midst of the Cold War without mentioning America is a serious case of denial.
The US-Japan Security Treaty (Anpo) protests (the subject of Linda Hoagland's new documentary) took place only a few years before this story, but only the attentive viewer will find mention of them in the film - in the scrapbooks visible in the bookcases in the school newspaper office. Locating history then becomes a pursuit of trivia little different than finding the “Ghibli” name on one of the ships.
This is thus an antiseptic, sterilized history. It is telling that, as the press notes declare, the film owes much of its vision of history to referencing Nikkatsu youth films from the early 1960s. Umi, it seems, is Yoshinaga Sayuri. From Up on Poppy Hill thus less preserves history as it really is, than offers an image of an image of history.
Such an overtly ideological reading of this film may rub some Ghibli fans the wrong way. Why not talk more about the animation? In some ways, this reading is necessary, given how too many readings of Miyazaki have attempted to emphasize his progressive politics, when in fact his films are more complex and contradictory – often to their benefit. But an ideological critique also seems warranted because the film emphasizes its romantic narrative over its status as animation. To put it differently, it is a story that could have as easily been told in a live action film. The fact it was not, however, is significant. True, animation does sell better in Japan, but in addition, I would argue that the narrative would have seemed less believable if its actors and locations were real. The disjuncture between its history and our reality would have been too much to sustain, so animation functions to ameliorate that gap.
Perhaps I am being harsh towards what is a reasonably pleasant, though ultimately undistinguished film. But choosing animation over live action was, I contend, itself an ideological choice, one that has the effect of rendering this version of history more palatable. There is a paternalist attitude in this, and I cannot but help tie it to the search for the lost father in the film, to the desire for a father figure who, like the chairman of the school board who steps in in the end, will solve the complex and contradictory nature of Japanese postwar history and identity by offering a consumable narrative backed by a strong, but benevolent authority – that is Japanese, not American.
One wonders if that father figure is what Miyazaki Hayao has become to many Japanese. (And what that means for Goro, who has yet to step out from under his father’s shadow, is another story.)
Toon Zone
23 August 2011
Hope for Ghibli's Next Generation in "From Up on Poppy Hill"
By Ben Applegate
I expect From Up on Poppy Hill (Kokurikozaka kara) will strike American Studio Ghibli fans as a little strange. It's not set in a fantastic world of gunslinger samurai, flying pigs, tiny people, magic cats, Japanese gods or aquatic toddler Valkyries. Actually, its world isn't fantastic at all, and its high school-aged heroes have more private (if no less precious) priorities: to save the school's aging club building and find out the truth about their absent parents. So the common thread between this and past Ghibli films is something else: reflections on fading memories and nostalgia for disappearing treasures.
The release of a new Studio Ghibli film is still a big event in Tokyo. Months ago the theme song was already available on CD, and even before the release date a major department store opened an exhibit on The Art of Poppy Hill. Yet the fanfare for some recent Ghibli offerings has been muted relative to the glory days of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. The reason for that is age. Ghibli's old masters, Hayao Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, are in their seventies, and they've been turning over the reins to a new, unproven generation of directors. The transition has been choppy. Last year's Arrietty, directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi, was a delightful adventure, but there was reason to fear Poppy Hill wouldn't measure up, as it was directed by Goro Miyazaki, Hayao's son.
Goro Miyazaki's first film, Tales from Earthsea, took a richly eccentric book series and turned it into just another moralizing fantasy cliché. In the breathtaking dragon designs and beautiful landscapes there were glimpses of the sensitive Ghibli soul Goro's father has nurtured in his decades as the grand master of anime, but in the end the film merely pitted a sword-wielding hero against an evil wizard. Earthsea disappointed its creator, Ursula K. LeGuin, and angered critics so much that it actually won the Japanese Razzie for worst film. It failed to live up even to the standard of the elder Miyazaki's weakest work, Howl's Moving Castle, which for all its incoherence at least made bold storytelling and visual choices and gave us multifaceted, startling characters.
Fortunately, it appears that in trudging up Poppy Hill, Goro has also made it over anime's learning curve. He hews much more closely to his source material, a manga series from the early 1980s, and (working with his father as a screenwriter) makes one of Ghibli's most emotionally focused and intimate recent films.
Umi is a Ghibli heroine reminiscent of Taeko from Only Yesterday and Shizuku from Whisper of the Heart. It's 1963, and hurried plans are underway for Japan's great postwar coming out party: the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. In Yokohama, south of the capital, the 16-year-old girl Umi (which means "sea" in Japanese) is the hardworking head of an unusual household that includes her siblings, grandmother and a few adult lodgers. The movie opens to the sound of a metronome, and Umi's life is carefully regimented: She wakes up early to put the rice on, replace the water and flowers at the family shrine, and raise maritime flags in the courtyard outside their house, built on a steep hill that overlooks the city's bustling harbor. The flags mean “good voyage,” and raising them is a ritual of devotion to Umi's father, who died at sea.
Every day, a passing tugboat raises a reply: MER (“sea” in French), which is Umi's nickname. It's an attempt by the 17-year-old Shun, one of Umi's classmates, to gain her attention. Shun is a passionate, even reckless boy who eventually draws Umi into the fight to save the Quartier Latin, the school's aging club activities building that's been set for demolition to make way for new development. It's an uphill battle, as a large faction of students think the building, full of stargazing otaku, rabble-rousers and weirdos, is little more than an eyesore.
In the early 1960s, the struggle to preserve tradition amid modernization, or even to figure out what was worthy of preservation, was a defining issue in a Japanese society balanced between an onrushing era of astonishing economic growth and the shadow of defeat in World War II. When Shun finds a familiar photograph in Umi's room, memories of national trauma will threaten their budding romance and force them to face an emotional coming of age.
Actually, in its relatively personal scale and nostalgic motifs, Kokurikozaka has more in common with the work of the other Ghibli master, Isao Takahata, particularly his Only Yesterday, which includes flashbacks to the same time period. Visually, it is miles apart from Earthsea, which had overly simple characters and employed cheap animation shortcuts. Kokurikozaka recreates 1963 Tokyo in impressive visual detail, from Umi's old-fashioned rice cooker to the packed, flashy alleys of Ginza at night (as also captured in Mikio Naruse's heart-wrenching When a Woman Ascends the Stairs). The vibrant lighting of the city at night deserves special praise.
The romance between Shun and Umi is handled with a surprisingly mature tone.The star of the film's designs is the Quartier Latin, which looks like just a creaky Western-style building on the outside but inside is a boy's dream clubhouse, with buckets on strings transporting missives from department to department and massive muckraking banners hanging beneath its impossibly high ceiling. Books and telescopes and printing equipment and empty tea kettles are packed up against every wall. The colors are earthy reds and browns, the masculine contrast to Umi's bright home of pastel hues, and it's inhabited by a cast of oddballs with that brand of solemn, macho and completely earnest passion that can only be found in boys of this age. My favorite was the head (and perhaps sole member) of the Philosophy Club, a frighteningly huge senior (actually, he looks 35) who appears to live in an indoor shack cobbled out of wooden boards at the top of the stairs, and who defeats his own desperate attempts to recruit new freshmen by coming on far, far too strong. This film may not have any actual magic in it, but one immediately senses that this is a magical place, similar in kind to Totoro's forest and Yubaba's bathhouse if not as fantastic.
Yet the focus on a particular age of Japanese history is why I think Poppy Hill may be received as an oddity in the United States. Its references to '60s Japanese singers (Kyu Sakamoto, Atsuo Okamoto), cars (Toyopet!), buildings (Sakuragicho Station) and events offer resonant hooks for Japanese viewers and foreigners who've studied the period, but may not do much for casual anime fans of my generation. You have between now and when this is released in the States to make an elderly Japanese friend to take along. It will enrich your experience by leaps, and your new friend will doubtless treat you to something delicious for having such fabulous taste.
The score is an odd mix of jazz, ragtime and piano. At one point, it features the classic Japanese pop song “Ue wo muite aruko.” Known unfortunately in the United States as “Sukiyaki,” it actually has nothing to do with beef stew. In fact the title means, “I walk looking up (so my tears won't fall)". It was a massive hit in a Japan emerging from poverty and defeat, though there would be many growing pains along the way. (Today it has added meaning in a country facing the aftermath of the Tohoku disaster.) And as the Yomiuri Shimbun pointed out in their review it's also pitch-perfect for the journey of these two young people, who look up hopefully to the future even as they treasure their personal traditions and learn how to overcome the ghosts of the past. And it's a good omen for a long future of lovely, thoughtful and moving films from Studio Ghibli.
