Film Review: "Ponyo"

[flowrs4ophelia]

I make it no secret that Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite directors, ranked right alongside live-action creators like Ang Lee and Tarantino. In the world of Japanese animation which to some can seem unvaried and constrained by the redundant conventions of its style, and at the same time among all animation from anywhere, his work has always stood out as having a very unique vision. Possibly one of his most widely accessible movies, Ponyo is just as entertaining for viewers of any age as this summer's Up and every bit as stunning and wildly imaginative.

Something I especially love about this one is simply the setting and the way it plays into the story. Most of it takes place in a pleasant little fishing town where a boy named Sosuke lives and his mother Lisa works at a home for the elderly. Their house is on a cliff by the ocean where Sosuke's father can signal to them when he passes by in his ship at night.

Parallel to this ordinary world and right outside Sosuke's door is the extraordinary and magical one of the ocean, easily unnoticed by grown-ups and other kinds of boring people. A formerly human sorcerer who lives down in the sea has to swim with difficulty through the townspeople's garbage as he comes near the shore in search of his runaway daughter. The ocean itself is an expressive character; at one point some sinister dark waves with angry eyes chase Sosuke back to the land after he takes something from the sea that belongs there. The sorcerer Fujimoto is responsible for maintaining a balance between these two worlds, but as the story progresses they become more and more merged until eventually part of the town ends up completely under water.

The engaging first few minutes with no dialogue show the magical fish girl Ponyo escaping from her father Fujimoto's underwater home and riding a jellyfish to discreetly make it closer to the surface. She gets her head stuck inside a glass jar and drifts helplessly to the beach where she is found by Sosuke. He saves her by breaking the jar with a rock, cutting his finger in the process, and figures out she's no ordinary goldfish when she heals his finger by licking it. There are some pretty big hints later as well, such as when she shows an insatiable love for eating ham and then starts talking to him. Carrying her everywhere in a pail of water, Sosuke promises to always protect her and then is heartbroken when Fujimoto steals her back into the sea, but soon she finds her way back to him in a different and very unexpected form.

Ponyo and Sosuke's friendship is sort of like a very innocent form of the kind of love story between Ashitaka and the "wolf princess" San in Princess Mononoke, which signified an unthinkable union between man and nature and was hindered by San's resentment for humans and the harm they'd caused many creatures to make her cold and vengeful. The conflict in this story simply comes from Fujimoto's similar distrust of humans which makes him keep his daughters sheltered (he is so overprotective he literally keeps Ponyo in a bubble at home). There's an amusing hint of hypocrisy in this, as Ponyo may have been born from an unusual relationship not unlike the kind he's trying to protect her from when he was still a normal human himself (Don't worry about making any sense of that biology, it really isn't important). But all the characters are ultimately understandable, none of them villains. The resolution at the end is almost anti-climactic because it seems quite easy, but unlike something like the long-built-up resentment between two sides in a violent conflict, the problem in this story of reaching acceptance is perhaps just not that hard to overcome. That's a good lesson to give children, and it also seems to suggest something often very true about how we can probably learn a lot from our kids.

In some of his recent work like Spirited Away, Miyazaki started incorporating computer animation into some sequences. With Ponyo he returns to using nothing but hand-drawn. There is a great dedication to detail and organic quality in his animation. When a little girl twirls in a circle to show Sosuke her new dress, you can see the attention that went into making her move like a child actually moves. Then there are the much more surreal sequences, like a scene when some fishermen on a ship find themselves approaching a bright city of lights on the horizon. They then find the lights are really from hundreds of other ships that have gotten piled together right before a point where the whole ocean is elevating dramatically like a mountainside. This is the kind of thing that's only as effective in an envisioning of complete fantasy; live-action, even with added CGI, is probably grounded too much in reality to make an image like this as easy to accept.

You can't go wrong starting with this one if you've never seen anything by this director before, and while many elements in it like the light-handed environmentalist themes will seem familiar to his fans, as a whole this film feels very new and freshly inspired. It has all the humor and charm of Castle In the Sky without the overly long runtime and a story as meaningful as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind without ever departing from its light tone. Miyazaki's last feature Howl's Moving Castle was a disappointment to some for its somewhat weak and unfocused story, and at some point later there was word that he might not make any more movies. Even if he consistently shows more talent and imagination than most, it's nice to find he definitely hasn't lost his touch for true greatness.

Comments

[ellcrys70]

I need to get this for my kids, they are huge Miyazaki fans. They have a bunch of their movies. My son likes to watch them in Japanese...LOL Must be a throwback to watching Japanese samurai movies with his Great-Grandmother.

[flowrs4ophelia.livejournal.com]

My son likes to watch them in Japanese...LOL Must be a throwback to watching Japanese samurai movies with his Great-Grandmother.
Aw. :) I like watching them in Japanese about half the time, but usually I'm too amused that people like Christian Bale and Billy Bob Thornton are on the English dubs for anime that I just have to see what they're like.

[ophelietta.livejournal.com]

I love this review of the movie (which I initially watched in Japanese, and which I'm going to watch Tuesday in English). My brothers and I are all huge Miyazaki and Ghibli fans, and my oldest brother was complaining that it wasn't Princess Mononoke or Spirited Away (which are the first two Miyazaki films I ever watched, and still my two favourites) and I said to him, "Well... stop expecting it to be." You got it right on that the film's strength is in its humour, its charm, its lightness, which gives it a completely different feel from Laputa or Nausicaa. I'm glad that Disney is doing the North American release, because that'll bring it a lot of publicity that it (rightly) deserves.

One other thing that always kills me with Miyazaki films is all that loving attention to detail that you mentioned (especially with the way Sousuke and Ponyo move and act). I love in Ghibli films when the real and the fantastic just meld together, to make things seem both believable and wondrous, at the same time. There's something in Ghibli films that Disney films don't have; one of the words Miyazaki used was "earnestness". Much as I love many Disney films, I sometimes get the uneasy feeling of tongue-in-cheek, cynical showmanship that sometimes distances me from the feelings inherent in the story. With Ponyo, and other Ghibli films (and Pixar films, too; of all the new releases I've watched this year - heck, maybe out of the hundred plus movies that I've watched this year alone - Up was by far my favourite), I get that sense of earnestness - that the people who make these films share that earnestness and that belief in wonder with the audience, as well.