Watching Poppy Hill Again

Reading posts and comments at Jr. Ganymede this week led again to thoughts of the Studio Ghibli animated film “From Up on Poppy Hill.” That one has lodged in my heart, and various expressions left here by many of a yearning for honorable family life that creates whole children who are becoming capable manly men and womanly women keep bumping against “Poppy Hill.” So, I watched it again tonight.

The setting is Yokohama 1963, and the central character is the 16-year-old daughter of a sea captain, who was lost when his cargo ship hit a mine during the Korean War. She is a very Ghibli girl, the sort of virtuous and highly responsible young woman you hope your sons will be blessed to find. She gets drawn into the world of her school’s throng of boys striving earnestly in their boyish way toward manhood. This involvement connects to her relationship with her departed father, and the climax of the story takes the girl and a boy to the bridge of a ship in Yokohama harbor where its captain delays departure fifteen minutes to tell them of his admiration for their fathers, his friends that he remembers every day.

My son, who introduced me to Studio Ghibli many years ago and watched with me tonight, said a quality of Ghibli movies is that they are “lively.” By that he meant they are brimming with detail. The foreground is part of a complete world surrounding it. When two characters walk down the road together, there is a very good sense in the composition as to what part of the day it is. In visits to a particular room there is a recurring noise coming from another room that is never explained or commented on. Another interesting quality of many Studio Ghibli movies is an appreciation of hierarchy and authority that comes more naturally even to Japanese leftists than to Americans of any stripe.