So, to start with the positives: PH has excellent painterly landscapes/backgrounds. The hillside and side-roads offer scope for Ghibli's work to shine. We can extend this to the crowd scenes showing all the citizens in their costumery set against the simultaneously modernizing & still traditional towns. In particular, I loved all the sequences & scenes set in the Latin Quarter, stuffed with all sorts of props & people in the background, making the clubhouse a character in its own right - in the dense detail, it is reminiscent of _Paprika_, _Honneamise_, _Tekkonkinkreet_, & _Ghost in the Shell 2_. (Since I remember my own high school & college club days very fondly, these triggered my own nostalgia & recognition in a way that the general setting couldn't possibly.)
The soundtrack has some well-chosen period pieces, but this is not a Ghibli production whose music will be long remembered like _The Borrowers Arrietty_, _Castle in the Sky_, _Whisper of the Heart_ etc. It's not bad, just nothing in it is *that* good.
The real bad news for _From Up on Poppy Hill_ is that the plot is *bad*. The movie is a failure because the story it tells is a disjointed mess, at least as bad as _The Borrowers Arrietty_ and similar to _Earthsea_. I can't agree with the fanboys gurgling with praise about how it depicts 'family' and 'love'.
The save-the-Latin-Quarter subplot is put on the backburner and long after we've forgotten about it, trivially resolved just by cleaning it, asking the boss nicely to come & see it, and he approves (one wonders just how realistic such a sequence is); it completely lacks any drama or tension, and takes up far less of the movie than one might expect. Instead, we are given a meandering subplot about the protagonist's budding love (fine; _Whisper of the Heart_ was fantastic, no reason the same story won't work twice) which is wildly derailed by a sudden revelation of siblinghood which comes from out of nowhere (and no, some portentous glances at a photograph do not meaningfully incorporate the twist into the story or motivate it), followed by the characters being disturbingly willing to engage in incest, followed by yet another bizarre revelation (apparently in the '40s and '50s, the Japanese swapped babies like baseball cards; it's all presented so casually I can't help but feel it's a little disrespectful to the actual orphans & children involved). It all adds up to a jumble of scenes which goes nowhere, feels random, and lack any sort of unifying theme. I had the same feeling as when watching _The Borrowers Arrietty_: like I was suffering from some literary version of Capgras delusion where the *real* _Poppy Hill_ plot had been replaced by an inferior crude substitute and this impostor had only a garbled memory of the original plot.
What went wrong? It's hard to tell, but also hard to not notice that Goro was involved here too. One of the key roles of the director is working on the plot and making sure everything comes together. The artists certainly did their job with the backgrounds and animation, but what about the rest? That was Goro's job. This makes 2 failures for Goro, and I have to wonder if Hayao is really going to let his son do a third movie just because Goro is his son: wouldn't anyone else have been fired or at least eased out of consideration for directing by now? I wonder if this is the future of Ghibli, especially now that Hayao has announced his retirement from feature-filmmaking in favor of smaller works for the Ghibli Museum etc.
Oh well. At least I can still look forward to watching his _The Wind Rises_.
