Ponyo

Lucky for me, Ponyo was playing at a multiplex nearby. Ghibli animation looks great on a theater screen, so I’m happy Disney still sees it fit to put some promotion behind showing Ghibli in US theaters in spite of some pretty weak box office numbers for their previous efforts. Ponyo is different than the more recent string of Ghibli movies. It’s very much a children’s story. As such, I found it beneficial to turn the adult brain off, kick back and enjoy, watching it as if I’ve never seen a fish before.

It’s a cute story about a little fish who one day encounters a boy, Sosuke, who was playing on the shore. As she swims, the fish gets stuck in a jar and the boy frees her, but eventually she finds herself back home under the sea with her father who only wants to protect her from the world. The fish wants to leave home and become human to stay with the boy. It’s like a Ghibli version of The Little Mermaid story. This fish, who gets named Ponyo by Sosuke, wills herself to become a girl so that she can be with Sosuke and that wish results in a tsunami that Ponyo runs on to find him. This is the highlight of the film. It’s one of the most amazing things I’ve seen, the way the waves rushed and swarmed to land and the joy of Ponyo as she runs toward Sosuke.

The way events occur in the movie is very simple without any complications. Even if the tsunami floods the entire town, it works out fine for everyone and nobody gets bent out of shape. The inhabitants just deal with it. Things happen, which leads to change, but nothing interferes with that change really. Life gets out of the way of living and people accept things at face value. My friend is a fish is greeted with as much acceptance and surprise from people as saying I like ham.

The lack of complication leaves not much of a “story” and makes it feel more like a fantastic day in a life — the plot is almost besides the point. Ponyo relies a lot on the characters endearing themselves to you in the magic of simple things over a satisfying resolution of the plot (I think this is my experience with most Miyazaki movies, as I’ve always found the resolution of the actual story in most of his films somewhat unsatisfying, but find myself happy at where all the characters are at in the end). Ponyo and Sosuke have their problem resolved by their mothers. The two kids merely express their wishes and their parents make it so. A bit anti-climactic, but I guess there’s a certain amount of truth to that situation and the way children live, or maybe it’s a suggestion to parents from a grandparent. Anyway, it’s one of the many places where it’s just a good idea to turn that adult brain off, watch and enjoy.

Visually, Ponyo is my favorite of the Ghibli movies. I could have enjoyed the movie for that alone. The depiction of the driving force of the sea during the tsunami is fantastic and the submerged aftermath a total dream of green and blue. There’s a warmth there, a human made this sort of feeling coming from the color and the hand drawing, which carries over into how they depicted the power and fluidity of the tsunami. The drawn animation (vs. using CG) of the scene adds to the wonder, in part because, I think we’ve probably seen CG waves enough to not even notice them all that much, or worse, notice how fake it looks.

Overall, I enjoyed Ponyo for what it was. It’s the type of Ghibli film I tend to enjoy, being closer to My Neighbor Totoro or Whisper of the Heart, than the more ambitious and sweeping works like Nausicaa and Princess Mononoke, so that’s my bias. For the visually oriented, it’s definitely worth seeing. If you require complexity, well maybe you’ve got other things to watch.