From Up on Poppy Hill

From Up on Poppy Hill (Japanese: コクリコ坂から Hepburn: Kokuriko-zaka Kara, "From Coquelicot Hill") is a 2011 Japanese animated drama film directed by Gorō Miyazaki, scripted by Hayao Miyazaki and Keiko Niwa, animated by Studio Ghibli for the Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners, Walt Disney Japan, Mitsubishi, and Toho, and distributed by the latter company.

Plot
It's 1963 and Japan is in the midst of swift modernization, leaving behind the Second World War's painful memories and focusing on a brighter future, symbolized by the coming year's Tokyo Olympics.

Why It Rocks

 * 1) Excellent animation.
 * 2) This is a film from Goro Miyazaki that's actually GOOD, which nobody expected after the critical failure of his previous movie, Tales from Earthsea. It also helps that Hayao Miyazaki helped wrote the scripts.
 * 3) Appealing character designs.
 * 4) The main heroine of the movie, Umi Matsuzaki, is a really strong female character. She's still a child, but due to her father being dead and her mother not being around, she has to act as the mother to her younger siblings. These struggles that we see her go through make her very likable and her arc in the story is engaging.
 * 5) Shun is an interesting male character, being the school newspaper president and having a decent backstory, where Umi's father, Yūichirō took a newborn Shun under his wing to prevent him from being sent to an orphanage, but was then subsequently given to Akio Kazama and his wife.
 * 6) Good voice acting.
 * 7) The growing romance between the two leads, Umi Matsuzaki and Shun Kazama, despite being a bit cliche, is engaging, and even tense towards the third act as the strength of their relationship starts to be tested.
 * 8) Great soundtrack.
 * 9) The film does a surprisingly good job of depicting society in 1963 Japan.

The Only Bad Quality

 * 1) While the romance and chemistry between them is great, Umi and Shun do not become a couple by the end of the movie.

Reception
From Up on Poppy Hill has an 84% critic rating and a 79% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes, a 3.6/5 on Letterboxd, a 7.6/10 on the International Movie Database (IMDB), a 79.23% community approval rating on Kitsu, and a 4/5 on AnimePlanet.

Videos
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