Stirring 'Poppy Hill' offers glimpse into Japan's past and culture
Sean Czarnecki
Daily Film EditorMay 16th, 2013
Studio Ghibli, hardly known for reining in the scope of its films, produces works that stretch across many different themes — even realities — in times of great struggle. The famed animation studio’s latest offering, “From Up on Poppy Hill,” is a thoughtful, lavish anime in the same vein. With a romantic backdrop, it meditates on Japan’s national history, on healing and on a conflict an entire generation carried: How can we free ourselves from the torturous past without losing our identity?
Gorō Miyazaki (“Tales from Earthsea”) takes over for his father — and Studio Ghibli director — Hayao Miyazaki in this stirring tale of the seaside town Yokohama in 1963, just before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. It’s a time of great change, which isn’t lost on the responsible but over-worked high schooler Umi Matsuzaki (Masami Nagasawa, “Crying Out Love in the Center of the World”).
Losing her father to a sea mine in the Korean War and left to manage an entire boarding house, Umi refuses to let go of the past. Every day, she raises signal flags for the good fortune of sailors. Her attachment to the past magnifies when the school’s old clubhouse faces demolition. The fight to save the dilapidated building is led by Umi’s love interest and school newspaper editor Shun Kazama (Jun’ichi Okada, “Hana”), whose past is intertwined with Umi’s as well as Japan’s tragic history of war.
It’s refreshing to watch Studio Ghibli at work. Where the CGI-heavy American animation values movement and to some extent, realism, Japanese anime has a charm — a human touch — that the recently deceased Roger Ebert described as “painterly.” “Poppy Hill” is lush and lively despite its two-dimensional format. Tokyo’s metamorphosis looks awe-inspiring. 1960s Japan is beautifully rendered.
The Miyazakis draw their characters wonderfully, but not just visually. Umi strives to be virtuous, works for her dreams and carries a deep conflict. But that does little justice to the film's patient character development that American children’s films frequently lack. In “How to Kill a Dragon,” a child could spout everything worth knowing about the main characters within the first 10 minutes. Conversely, “Poppy Hill” has no convenient voiceover and no swift exposition. For nearly five minutes, Umi simply prepares breakfast. But pay close attention — the beauty is worth those little extra moments the animators took.
Admittedly, the plot does falter. Umi and Shun’s romance falls into an unexpectedly weird area, but luckily, the Miyazaki father-son team lands the couple gently on better ground. The real problem is the end: While the resolution’s muted catharsis stops itself short of overblown melodrama, it’s more formulaic than it is bold. The viewer doesn’t find themselves in an entirely different place than where they were at the start of the film.
The quietude of anime is always a welcome detour from the chum churned out year after year from Pixar (though it's usually very good chum). But to be fair, it would make more sense to compare “Poppy Hill” with Studio Ghibli's other work. In short, an off year is still better than most others’ good years.
At times, I wonder if an American can truly appreciate anime. It has a mysterious exoticism, perhaps culture-specific, that's impossible to entirely peel away. I suspect the Japanese viewer, more akin to the culture, would feel its depth more aptly than an American, like me, ever could.
Yet good anime accomplishes what all good art should strive for: understanding your fellow man. Here, though impaired by ignorance, “Poppy Hill” aroused a curiosity in me for a culture I know best by Pokémon.
We know Japan as the land of samurais, neon cityscapes and Honda — that place we dropped two giant bombs on. Not as the country that took a long time healing, that suffered pain as we suffered pain, that died as we died, that lived as we lived.
Printed from www.michigandaily.com on Tue, 28 May 2013 05:49:25 -0400