From Up On Poppy Hills
After first working as a landscape architect, Goro Miyazaki (son of legendary animated filmmaker Hayao) was lured into the family business as the inaugural director of the Studio Ghibli Museum in 2001. By 2006, he’d drifted into the director’s chair for the animated Ursula K Le Guin adaptation Tales From Earthsea. His second film, From Up On Poppy Hill, is a nostalgic melodrama set in early 1960s Yokohama adapted for the big screen by his father — a very different prospect to the Earthsea’s epic, dragon-filled fantasy. From Up On Poppy Hill is set in 1963, but you weren’t actually born until four years after that. How did you prepare for the design of the film? Luckily there is a lot of documentation on the way of life in what we call the Showa Period in Japan. In fact, there was almost too much information! There are also many live action films and so on from the period which were a great help and I interviewed women who were high school students at the time. However, this peri...