Ponyo: Official Site
Hayao Miyazaki, the master of Japanese anime and the creator of breathtaking films like My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki’s Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle, and the Academy Award-winning Spirited Away, not only knows how to paint the prettiest of pictures (his watercolor and pastel animation style is near fine art next to the antiseptic computer graphic pixel painting of Pixar and its always-a-bridesmaid competitor Dreamworks), but also how to tell the most classic of stories.
With Ponyo, Miyazaki borrows heavily from Hans Christian Anderson’s (by way of Walt Disney) The Little Mermaid and hands us the story of a magical goldfish who wills herself to become a human girl when she meets a little boy in a small Japanese port village. Trailed by her father, a seemingly evil wizard, and watched by her mother, some sort of sea goddess, Ponyo is befriended by a little boy and his young, somewhat frazzled, mother. Like his other films, Miyazaki’s latest is replete with both a magical overshadowing (a common denominator in Japanese storytelling) and a desire to tell a very human story. This mélange of worldly and otherworldly fancy acts as modern day fable, and, thus, makes Miyazaki a modern day troubadour of sorts.
As with his other most recent films, there is a Japanese version of Ponyo as well as a corresponding English-language take, commissioned by Disney and using the voice talents of Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett, Liam Neeson, Cloris Leachman, Tina Fey, Noah Cyrus, Miley’s little sister, and Frankie Jonas, the fourth and youngest of the Jonas boys. Now, of course, since this is a film by a Japanese director and styled in his own very unique, eastern mystical way (Miyazaki’s painterly style looks as if it were taken straight from Japanese masters), the original is inevitably a better film. But fortunately, the slight nuances and change in mood and mode (merely the voices that are changed) do not ruin this beautifully striking animation. The exotic beauty of the Orient is still there in Miyazaki’s hand-painted images.
Ponyo never quite reaches the magical realm that is Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the closest thing the anime auteur has to a true masterpiece, and thus never becomes as ethereal and transformative. Upon watching said Spirited Away, my mind left everything, and I was engulfed in pure fantasy as only a truly great film can do. In Ponyo, there is the message, like in many of Miyazaki’s films, that we should save the earth. The filmmaker’s ecological bent satiated by the (halfbreed?) wizard Fujimoto and his exclamation of disgust at humanity: “They spoil the sea. They treat your home like their empty, black souls.” So, in the end, Ponyo still manages to enchant on a more earthbound existence. At least as earthbound as a movie about a magical goldfish, born of a wizard and a goddess, who becomes a little girl can be.
Perhaps it is aimed at a younger audience than the director’s other recent oeuvre (like many an aging filmmaker, going back to his gentler, more kid-friendly early days) and thus never delves as deeply—or as violently—into the psyche as Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke do. Perhaps, too, does its “ordinary-ness,” for lack of a better word, act as somewhat of a letdown. This is Miyazaki, by God, he is supposed to be better than this! Yet, in sum, if just for the sheer beauty of its imagery, Ponyo is worth the look. After all, despite its lack of narrative chutzpah (again, for lack of a better word) Ponyo does entertain with its breathtaking anime style (something much more real than the over-boiled, hospital-cornered, coldly conceptualized, picture-perfect crispness that is Pixar and much of today’s computer-generated cartoonery) and its old-fashioned, classic storytelling. A set piece of sorts about midway through the film, where the tsunami-to-end-all-tsunamis hits the little port town, and we see a half-human Ponyo running across the tops of the gigantic waves, is one of the most majestic ever attempted by the animator. Here’s hoping Miyazaki never decides to put down his brush and begin clicking a mouse.
Kevyn Knox is a film historian and critic. His reviews can be read at www.thecinematheque.com. He is a regular contributor to Film International and Plume-Noire and is the regular film columnist for a local alternative monthly called The Burg. He is also the cinema director of Midtown Cinema in his hometown of Harrisburg, PA, and has sat upon the jury of the Harrisburg Film Festival every year since 2004. He is currently working on his first book, tentatively titled, Wild Bill: The Life, Times & Films of William A. Wellman.