"It's right out of a cheap melodrama," one character remarks in From Up on Poppy Hill after a particularly extreme twist of fate — yet this film's gentle storytelling manages to extract the emotional ...

And from Japan comes this creation, the new animated film "From Up on Poppy Hill." It marks the first collaboration of a celebrated father, the Oscar-winning director of "Spirited Away," and his son.

Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki may be celebrated as a fantasist, but he also excels at realistic portraits of early adolescence: in his screenplays for Whisper of the Heart (1995) and this 2011 ...