From Up On Poppy Hill Reviews
Top CriticIn the wisdom of this artfully rendered film, Umi and Shun - and the viewer - come to learn that the past and the future should go hand in hand, that the best way to move forward is to reflect, and respect, what came before.
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| Original Score: 3/4
The story of a girl grappling with first love, the absence of her parents and the anxieties of an on-rushing future in 1963 Yokohama has all the earmarks of a Miyazaki classic.
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| Original Score: 3.5/4
The film's perfectly fine, but it's not a patch on "Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro," "Princess Mononoke," and other Studio Ghibli classics.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
This is a gentle film, hand-drawn with irresistible colors, that exudes nostalgia in a lovely way.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Although simpler and less mysterious than the great Hayao Miyazaki movies, the gently melancholic From Up on Poppy Hill is still a must see at a time when family entertainment is too often synonymous with blandness.
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| Original Score: B+
Is there a Japanese word that combines "pretty," "demure" and "boring"?
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
The film maintains an optimistic tone without succumbing to nostalgia, and as always with Studio Ghibli, the company Miyazaki cofounded in the 80s, the hand-drawn animation is gorgeous.
Your kids may well fall in love with it, if you help them find it.
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| Original Score: 4/4
The artistry is peaceful and comforting to the eyes but not especially stirring. Given the pictorial extremes that Studio Ghibli has gone to in the past, "Up on Poppy Hill" is weak tea.
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| Original Score: 2.5/4
Likely to appeal to young audiences - especially teenagers - and possibly even to jaded adults, who may look back on their own first yearnings of puppy love with nostalgia and affection.
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| Original Score: 3/4
A film about many things-so many that the magic of Studio Ghibli's past has been displaced by exposition and earnest discussion.
The screenplay deftly balances the characters' intimate concerns with the nation's historic growing pains, resulting in a story that's as engrossing as the visuals are breathtaking.
"From Up on Poppy Hill" is frankly stunning, as beautiful a hand-drawn animated feature as you are likely to see.
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| Original Score: 4/5
It's the sort of movie that can prompt daydreams about inhabiting its world of flowers and hills, passing ships and harbor lights, where there's no Internet and romance happens face to face.
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| Original Score: 3/4
Its visual magic lies in painterly compositions of foliage, clouds, architecture and water, and its emotional impact comes from the way everyday life is washed in the colors of memory.
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| Original Score: 3.5/5
Those gorgeous, hand-drawn images bring lightness and grace to a story that might seem drab and pedestrian in the real world.
Even with no wood sprites, witches or spells, there's plenty of magic in this coming-of-age charmer.
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| Original Score: 3/5
Some third-act revelations may really test the scales of plausibility, but Poppy Hill ultimately is not about its story as much as the emotional states it probes.
Shows a different side of the Japanese animation house, one that finds equal wonder in comparatively mundane affairs.
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| Original Score: 4/5
Goro Miyazaki has made a sweetly old-fashioned anime with fine painterly compositions.
The jury's still out on whether Goro Miyazaki can sustain his father's legacy as storyteller, though with its beautiful visuals and songs, Poppy Hill finds a deserving, if modest, place among its Studio Ghibli peers.
