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Kokurikozaka kara (2011)
Jul. 28th, 2011 21:05Kokurikozaka kara | From Upon Poppy Hill, prod. Studio Ghibli, dir. Miyazaki Gorô, 2011.
I've had an embarrassment of riches in terms of anime movies this summer, and I'm happy to report that this last film, Studio Ghibli's newest, did not end my streak on a sour note. To wit, this is classic Ghibli, decidedly not very innovative within the main line of the oeuvre but warm and human and quietly beautiful in that way that life is, if we keep our hearts open for it. Certainly Miyazaki Gorô has redeemed himself in my book after the travesty that was Gedo Senki.
The internet tells me that the movie is based on a 1980 manga, set in southern Yokohama in 1963. It's very much a movie of that time, right down to the inclusion of Sakamoto Kyu's classic "Ue wo Muite Arukô" in the soundtrack not once but twice. The film follows Matsuzaki Umi, a second-year high school student, and her burgeoning relationship with her classmate Kazama Shun. Shun's a member of the student newspaper, and Umi has good penmanship, so she starts helping write out their articles to be inked and run off. Not long after that she gets the idea to clean out the old mansion that serves as a clubhouse for the student activity groups, and learns some surprising things about hers and Shun's parents.
When I put it like this it sounds horribly slight, and I suppose it is, if you think that family and love and grief are not inherently important topics. Umi and her sister and mother and the women who live with them are all finely etched, and Shun and the students--radical as all students in the 1960s were, so earnest it's painful, unaware or determinedly ignoring the fact that the nails have already been pounded into the coffin of their activism--are achingly real too, in that Ghibli sketch way. The scene where the students instantly switch from a near fist-fight debate to singing classic songs en masse to fool the school principal is brilliant.
It says something about this film, I think, and about Japan today, that it's set in the spring of 1963, when Japan's economy was starting to really lift off and everyone has the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 firmly on the brain and the war that stole Umi's and Shun's parents wasn't the Asia-Pacific but the Korean War. This is, of course, a movie soaked in nostalgia, but various sharp notes keep it from being saccharine, and if the movie's shocking plot twist is revealed in the end to be not a twist at all, that doesn't change the fact that the plot does feint where it feinted. (Yes, I'm being vague.) Fifty years later, it all seems very far out of reach, but closer in some ways than Miyazaki Hayao's Gake no Ue no Ponyo, even though that movie was aggressively set in the present.
Aside from Ponyo, I was reminded most of Mimi wo Sumaseba, which has similar themes and which, significantly, was the only film directed by Miyazaki Hayao's hand-picked successor Kondô Yoshifumi before the latter's untimely death. (I was also reminded somewhat of Kiki's Delivery Service, in that one of the women living in Umi's house is a painter, but unfortunately we never get to hear her views on art and creation.) If Miyazaki Gorô can keep this up, Studio Ghibli will be in good, if perhaps not brilliant, hands for the foreseeable future.
I've had an embarrassment of riches in terms of anime movies this summer, and I'm happy to report that this last film, Studio Ghibli's newest, did not end my streak on a sour note. To wit, this is classic Ghibli, decidedly not very innovative within the main line of the oeuvre but warm and human and quietly beautiful in that way that life is, if we keep our hearts open for it. Certainly Miyazaki Gorô has redeemed himself in my book after the travesty that was Gedo Senki.
The internet tells me that the movie is based on a 1980 manga, set in southern Yokohama in 1963. It's very much a movie of that time, right down to the inclusion of Sakamoto Kyu's classic "Ue wo Muite Arukô" in the soundtrack not once but twice. The film follows Matsuzaki Umi, a second-year high school student, and her burgeoning relationship with her classmate Kazama Shun. Shun's a member of the student newspaper, and Umi has good penmanship, so she starts helping write out their articles to be inked and run off. Not long after that she gets the idea to clean out the old mansion that serves as a clubhouse for the student activity groups, and learns some surprising things about hers and Shun's parents.
When I put it like this it sounds horribly slight, and I suppose it is, if you think that family and love and grief are not inherently important topics. Umi and her sister and mother and the women who live with them are all finely etched, and Shun and the students--radical as all students in the 1960s were, so earnest it's painful, unaware or determinedly ignoring the fact that the nails have already been pounded into the coffin of their activism--are achingly real too, in that Ghibli sketch way. The scene where the students instantly switch from a near fist-fight debate to singing classic songs en masse to fool the school principal is brilliant.
It says something about this film, I think, and about Japan today, that it's set in the spring of 1963, when Japan's economy was starting to really lift off and everyone has the Tokyo Olympics of 1964 firmly on the brain and the war that stole Umi's and Shun's parents wasn't the Asia-Pacific but the Korean War. This is, of course, a movie soaked in nostalgia, but various sharp notes keep it from being saccharine, and if the movie's shocking plot twist is revealed in the end to be not a twist at all, that doesn't change the fact that the plot does feint where it feinted. (Yes, I'm being vague.) Fifty years later, it all seems very far out of reach, but closer in some ways than Miyazaki Hayao's Gake no Ue no Ponyo, even though that movie was aggressively set in the present.
Aside from Ponyo, I was reminded most of Mimi wo Sumaseba, which has similar themes and which, significantly, was the only film directed by Miyazaki Hayao's hand-picked successor Kondô Yoshifumi before the latter's untimely death. (I was also reminded somewhat of Kiki's Delivery Service, in that one of the women living in Umi's house is a painter, but unfortunately we never get to hear her views on art and creation.) If Miyazaki Gorô can keep this up, Studio Ghibli will be in good, if perhaps not brilliant, hands for the foreseeable future.