Ah, Studio Ghibli has done it again, successfully making another movie. This is the first movie they made since the last one. Take that, studios going out-of-business. What’s that? Standards? Oh, those. Yeah. None of that to be found here. This one blew. From Up on Poppy Hill substituted the usual Ghibli array of the fantastical and curious with civic lessons and suggested incest.
Forget everything you know about Ghibli. This one is so bereft of magic, it could have been live inaction. Umi (voice of Masami Nagasawa) lost her father in the Korean War. Each morning as the sun greets her small village, she raises nautical flags to his memory. Her house, stuffed with freeloading relatives, overlooks the harbor, but the ships pass by without comment. The film is about Umi coming to terms with her struggle, and we only ever see her doing one of two things: overworking to support her family or overworking to support her school. The part where she gets roped into the school clubhouse support group was priceless: “Hey, my friend wants your autograph.” “Wow, that’s great; say how would you like to copy some text like a Franciscan Monk for the next two hours? Sounds like fun, right?”
I’m getting ahead of myself. Love interest Shun (Junichi Okada. Wait, sorry, that’s Jun’ichi Okada) introduces himself by jumping off the school roof. You’d think with a name like “Shun,” he’d be avoided by the other kids. :rimshot: The roof bit was the lone bit of frivolity in the film. Cherish it. Shun represents the student clubhouse, which sees girls as often as it sees koala bears and gets 
cleaned about once every World War. When the girls show up to pay homage to rebel Shun, suddenly it’s cleaning time. Hmmmmm. Very forward thinking of you, 1960s Japan. Umi falls for Shun, but then they discover they both carry the same photograph around of dad! Oh, no. I’m not especially fond of incest angles, but hey, there wasn’t a freaking catbus in this film. It’s all good. And by “good,” I mean it sucked.
For the rest of Poppy Hill, we play two story lines: Umi and Shun together wondering about their relationship and the kids waging perfectly legal and standard channel warfare to save their clubhouse from being torn down and replaced. Way to take the animated out of anime, fellas.
From Up on Poppy Hill is directed by Goro Miyazaki, son of legendary director Hayao Miyazaki. Sometimes the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and sometimes the apple falls, rolls down the hill, lands in a sewer, drifts away to a final resting place in a sludge-filled ditch where it festers, rotting aside a chemical plant, slowly devoured by toxic bacteria. Far as I can tell, Goro decided the main problems with is father’s films were that they showed images people might wish to see and told stories people might wish to hear.
And they received praise in written form.
Poor fatherless schoolgirl Umi
Her life isn’t altogether roomy
Her boyfriend’s her brother?
I suggest pillow smother
This film sucked hard, so sue me.
Rated PG, 91 Minutes
D: Goro Miyazaki
W: Tetsurô Sayama, Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa
Genre: He’s not MY son
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: People nostalgic for Korean War casualty lists
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Have you ever seen a Hayao Miyazaki film?
