Room with a View: FROM UP ON POPPY HILL

Studio Ghibli, the beloved Japanese animation studio best known for its fantasy masterpieces like Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro, and Castle in the Sky, has an impressive track record. So sharply observed and deeply felt, these films are special in the way they have an instinctual feel for characters’ internal lives and daily routines expressed through meticulously gorgeous animation that’s beautiful in both design and gesture. When making a film that’s considerably more realistic in approach, like the harrowing World War II drama Grave of the Fireflies or the tender young romance of Whisper of the Heart, this asset can been seen clearly. Take away the fantasy and their films are still full of magic. Ghibli’s latest film to hit American shores is From Up on Poppy Hill, a gentle, observant film with drama kept decidedly small, sweet, and casual. Much like the studio’s earlier human dramas, this is a film that takes plots that could seem stale and lets in fresh air by providing breathing room, space for stillness, pauses of atmosphere and tender emotion.

With a light dusting of nostalgia in the imagery, Poppy Hill takes place in the early 1960s in a small seaside Japanese town. The main character is Umi, a girl who lives with her grandmother and helps run the family’s boarding house. The building contains a number of characters briefly but evocatively glimpsed, a collection of women young and old who encourage one another and are as much friends as landlords and tenants. The film is mainly concerned with the girl’s routine, going to school and rushing home to work. Every morning she runs signal flags up the building’s flagpole, a habit that keeps alive the memory of her father, a sailor who died in the Korean War. She yearns to know more about him, but her mother is away studying in the United States. This develops into a softly, richly felt subplot.

Life moves forward. A tentative romance starts between the girl and a charismatic schoolmate. The boy and girl are feeling the first blushes of puppy love, strong enough to pull them towards each other, but unspoken, so that rather than being together for the sake of being together, they must find other, more practical reasons to meet. Other subplots include the boy’s interest in his family’s past and their schoolmates’ struggle to save their historic clubhouse from certain doom at the hands of the school board. Many of these plot threads center on the kids, the first post-WWII generation, looking to apply knowledge and lessons of the past in their present and future. The film, alive with period music and subtly rendered detail, works calmly around its theme of memory.

What makes all of this work is the patience with which it plays out. One character, dismayed over a new piece of information, bemoans that it’s like something out of a “cheap melodrama,” but the film never feels emotionally chintzy. It’s too willing to take the time to let characters feel a multiplicity of emotions, respond to more than one motivation, feel inner conflict that leaks out into their behaviors. An early moment, so fast you might miss it, is indicative of the film’s typical Ghibli touch for allowing close observation in its animation. Two girls approach the boy-dominated clubhouse and ask a simple question of two boys hard at work. When the boys respond, their cheeks gain subtle bright smudges of red. They’re both excited and embarrassed by the prospect of talking to girls. It’s a nice throwaway detail that’s hardly necessary but makes all the difference.

The film, co-written by Hayao Miyazaki and directed by his son Goro, feels consistent with the studio’s house style of emotionally engaged visual detail. There’s something refreshing about a film that’s so confidently small, so willing to simply sit with its characters in their world and see what happens. Though the narrative gently pulls them along, there’s a sense that it’d be just as well if it didn’t. Per usual, Ghibli delivers an animated film with a sense of place and purpose that unfolds at a welcome unhurried pace. It’s practically a guarantee that even a minor Ghibli effort, as this is, will be better than most animated features you’ll see in a given year.

Quick Look: THE SECRET WORLD OF ARRIETTY

In a world of rapid-fire CGI quips from Hollywood, it’s refreshing to disappear into the world of a hand-drawn Studio Ghibli film from Japan. It’s a calm, patient oasis in the middle of a hectic modern world. Their newest film to be brought by Disney to our shores is The Secret World of Arrietty, a version of Mary Norton’s book The Borrowers adapted by Ghibli’s rightly beloved co-creator Hayao Miyazaki. The story follows a family of toy-sized people who live under the floorboards and in the walls of an old house in the countryside, sneaking into rooms at night to borrow only what they need: a cube of sugar, a tissue, a pin. As the movie begins, a sickly young boy shows up to live with his aunt and get some rest in advance of a risky surgery that is necessary to save his life. He thinks he spots these fabled little people; the thought delights him. The little family, daughter Arrietty, her steady father and excitable mother, think they’ve been spotted too; the thought terrifies them. It’s a movie about survival, but only in the quietest, most melancholic sense. It’s a movie about learning to be kind to your neighbors, to take chances in learning to understand one another. It’s sweet and simple, but with a lovely attention to emotional – and, in true Ghibli fashion, visual – detail. Animator and first-time director Hiromasa Yonebayashi creates a world of new perspectives, following the borrowers’ point of view, which shows our world from a much lower angle, then switching to the boy’s view, making the common world uncommon. Ultimately, the film doesn’t have the majesty of Miyazaki’s own masterworks, but its still moving in a modest way. Like all of the great Studio Ghilbi films, it traces an invisible line between reality and fantasy, between nature and magic, with nimble beauty and heartfelt skill.