From Up on Poppy Hill

This is Goro Miyazaki’s second film after Tales from Earthsea. His father Hayao Miyazaki wrote the screenplay with Keiko Niwa, from a 1980 shojo manga written by Tetsuro Sayama and drawn by Chizuru Takahashi. It is set in Yokohama in 1963. Umi raises signal flags each morning wishing safe voyages. The school clubhouse is called the Latin Quarter, and the board wants it demolished as part of the rebuilding before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Miyazaki first researched the city, then decided that simply re-enacting the period might look real without being beautiful, and chose to make the port shimmer. The period feeling here comes from a deliberate prettying rather than documentary fidelity. Production ran into the 2011 Tohoku earthquake. Rolling blackouts pushed the drawing into night shifts, and the team said animation stood at about 50 percent when it would otherwise have passed 70. Hayao Miyazaki declared the date of 16 July 2011 would hold. It was named animation of the year at the 35th Japan Academy Film Prize. A good fit if you want the flag raising, the cooking and the clearing of a building to take as much room as the secret does. Not for anyone coming to Ghibli for creatures and flight, since the crisis here is a demolition order and a family register entry.