Set in 1960s Japan, in a country finally starting to really shake the scars of WW2 off and come into its own, the story follows high school girl Umi as she becomes embroiled in the exploits of the Latin Quarter, a catch-all antique mansion of a campus building that houses all the nerdy clubs, from astronomy to philosophy to chemistry. The building is old and decrepit and on the verge of being torn down, but the geeks who call it home place a lot of value in its history and are mounting a massive attempt to stop the school’s upcoming decision to bulldoze it. Umi and her friends end up joining the effort, and from there the plot progresses pretty much as you’d expect. There’s triumphs and effort, lessons learned and struggles overcome, a budding romance with a late-stage plot twist that even one of the characters acknowledges as feeling like “something out of a cheap melodrama”, and the story overall takes pretty much every well-worn track stories of this nature tend to take. I describe it as feeling like your average slice-of-life anime because I could very easily see this premise be expanded out into a 12-episode season, where we get to spend more time meeting the many quirky characters of the Latin Quarter and all their eclectic interests, engaging in K-On patented high school hangout sessions along the way. The whole film carries that kind of easy charm with it, eschewing Ghibli’s more ambitious tendencies in favor of a simple, down-to-earth story will no real surprises along the way.
And honestly, I don’t think that’s entirely to its benefit. I appreciate a good slice-of-life anime as much as the next person, but there’s a certain blandness to this world that’s hard to shake. It takes a good fifteen minutes for the film to really get moving, setting up Umi’s home life and struggles in ways that aren’t really interesting, before it shows its first spark of life in a fun montage of her and her friends first moving through the Latin Quarter and being treated to a sideshow of the colorful personalities who call it home. And even then, as fun and charmingly breezy as these characters all are, I was constantly left feeling like we could be doing more with them. I value Ghibli’s ambition highly because the experiences that ambition leads to are some of the most raw, stunning experiences anime has to offer, executed by the most imaginative minds and the most talented artisans of the craft. Poppy Hill, in contrast, often struggles to have much of an identity at all, and I wonder whether it would have worked better as a full show that could give more room to explore the unique eccentricities of the Latin Quarter and its students. It’s not really bad, it just feels kind of flat and dull at times. And that’s one crime I’ve never been able to accuse Ghibli of in the past.
However, there’s another element to Poppy Hill that makes my understanding of it even more complex. You see, I didn’t just mention the particulars of the setting two paragraphs ago as flavor text; Japanese culture and history is a constant, tangible presence in every single conflict throughout the movie. The fight for the clubhouse is explicitly framed in a rowdy student debate as a clash between the old, stuffy ideals of the past Empire and the new, callous ideas represented by the budding democracy, the decision over how much of the past it’s worth letting go and how much is worth carrying into the future. Umi’s father was killed in the Korean War, and she still raises signal flags every day in some vain hope that he might see them and come wandering through the front door. The complication that befalls the central relationship, without spoiling anything, is directly tied into this history of war, how it left scars on an entire generation that are still healing even in the brightness of the present. It’s a film about normalcy, but that normalcy doesn’t exist in isolation; it’s constantly contrasted with the horrors and pain of a world this new generation of Japanese kids will only ever know from history books and their elders’ stories. And all throughout, it asks what the measure of that past is, what it should be, and what Japan should become going forward.
It’s that central question that makes it difficult for me to fully pin down my feelings regarding Poppy Hill, because it’s not the kind of idea the film expects you to easily digest. It hangs in the shadowy fog of the background and often intrudes into the text as well, but the ultimate resolutions are rather open-ended, and it isn’t always clear how heavy that specter is hanging over any particular moment. I compare it to Isao Takahata because much like that director’s works, it’s a film that requires you to ask your own questions and come to your own conclusions along the way. But considering that it still carries the soft, warm aesthetic of Miyazaki’s handiwork and craft, that dichotomy makes for an interesting contrast that I’m not quite sure I’ve solved yet. Is the film stronger for relying so heavily on the normalcy of its presentation to highlight the horrors of what it was birthed from, or is it just too boring for its own good? Are the complex questions of heritage and history highlighted or diminished by the movie’s overall simple presentation? Whatever the case may be, it presents an interesting quandary, and I suspect that I’ll be puzzling over it for a while after I finish this post. Perhaps my opinion will shift so drastically in reconsideration that I’ll be forced to junk this whole review and start over from scratch.
Still, if this is to be the plainest Ghibli film ever made, at least it carries the promise that even the studio’s least inspired output still carries enough intrigue to make it worth further consideration. From Up on Poppy Hill isn’t a very special film, but it’s enjoyable enough, with enough good charm and likable personality to justify its existence while you mull its more complex questions over.
