Kokurikozaka Kara - From Up On Poppy Hill / Kokurikozaka Kara [Japan BD] VWBS-1323

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Kokurikozaka Kara - From Up On Poppy Hill / Kokurikozaka Kara [Japan BD] VWBS-1323 Review

(Note: this is a review of the movie, not of the DVD. Based on other reviews, I would advise potential buyers to be cautious about the quality of the specific DVD being sold.)

From Up on Poppy Hill (Kokuriko-zaka Kara) is nothing less than the best Studio Ghibli film since 2004's Howl's Moving Castle, possibly even since 2001's Spirited Away. Directed by Goro Miyazaki from a screenplay by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, From Up on Poppy Hill is based on a 1980 serialized Japanese graphic novel of the same name, illustrated by Chizuru Takahashi and written by Tetsuro Sayama. The animation is lush and lovingly detailed, and the story an engaging tale of two high school students dealing with first love and with the importance of the past, both on a cultural and institutional level, and, as it turns out, on an intimately personal level as well.

The story is set in 1963 in the port town of Yokahama in Japan in 1963 against the backdrop of the country getting ready to host the 1964 Olympic Games. Umi Matsuzaki is a sixteen-year-old high school girl living with her family and a couple of boarders in a house on top of a hill that overlooks the harbor. Her mother Ryoko, a medical professor, is currently away, studying abroad in the United States. In her mother's absence, Umi runs the house and looks after her younger siblings, Sora and Riku, and her grandmother, Hana. The boarders, both women, are an artistic college student named Sachiko Hirokouji and a doctor-in-training named Miki Hokuto. Umi's father, we learn, died many years ago when Umi was quite young, killed when his cargo ship hit a mine during the Korean War. As a kind of ritual to his memory, each morning Umi raises a set of naval signal flags up a flagpole outside the house with the message "Safe Voyage" to the ships out in the harbor.

One day, an anonymous poem about the flags appears in the school newspaper. Curious, Umi decides to visit the school newspaper to ask who wrote the poem. The school paper is published out of an office located in a delapidated old building on the school grounds nick-named "the Latin Quarter" which houses all of the school clubs and has done so for as long as anyone can remember. But the Latin Quarter is now endangered by a plan to tear it down and replace it with a brand new building as part of Japan's modernization program to put on its best face for the upcoming Olympics, a move that has the students divided between those who want everything to be new and those who have an emotional attachment to the old and traditional, which they see embodied by their beloved Latin Quarter.

On the way to visit the paper's office, Umi, accompanied by Sora, witness another student, Shun Kazama, performing a daredevil stunt to get publicity for the paper's "Save the Latin Quarter" drive. Umi is somewhat less than impressed by Shun's feat, but when she reaches the school paper office, she discovers that Shun, along with his friend Shiro Mizunuma who is the student government president, is the publisher of the school paper (and also, as she learns later, the author of the poem about her flags). Before she knows it, Umi is volunteering to help, first with the paper, preparing stencils, and then soon with their drive to save the Latin Quarter. She suggests that the best way to start would be to give the building a complete facelift, first with a thorough cleaning and then with much needed repairs and a fresh paint job. In this cause, Umi enlists the school's female student population, which in turn gets the male students guickly - and enthusiastically - on board.

As they work together, Umi and Shun start feeling a growing attraction to each other. But the path of young love is rarely smooth, and theirs is thrown for a bigger curve than most when Umi shows Shun a photograph of three young naval men, one of whom is her deceased father. But Shun has seen this photograph before, and suddenly a past neither of them were previously aware of begins to assert itself, complicating their budding relationship before it's properly begun. From that point on, the twin plot threads - of Umi and Shun and their pasts and of the students' crusade to save the Latin Quarter - are subtly intertwined. To say more would be to spoil the story.

The animation in From Up on Poppy Hill is wonderfully detailed and executed in so many ways it would take a long time to properly describe them. The Latin Quarter clubhouse is a marvel of clutter, completely believable as the sort of old place whose every corner would be filled with incredibly varied bric-a-brac due to the myriad kind of clubs it houses (and going for years without a proper cleaning because that's not typically a high priority with most boys).

Another thing I particularly liked were the subtle changes in the backgrounds as evening approached in some scenes; you could feel the sun slowly beginning to set with the ever-so-slight lengthening of shadows and changes in the hue of the sky. Equal detail was given to the way the characters moved and the things they did. In one scene, when Umi is preparing dinner, she pours the rice into a square box, then carefully runs a flat edge over the top to level it so that the amount measured out is exact. It's a minor detail not dwelled upon, but one of many similar ones that give the film a depth of reality rarely found in most animated films.

Highly, highly recommended for anyone who loves beautiful animation, engaging characters and truly first-class story-telling that never condescends to its audience.

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