Ponyo

Now we have come to one of the cutest, but weirdest movies produced by Studio Ghibli, “Ponyo,” released in 2009.

Dana Stevens started her review out by saying, “All the way through Ponyo (Walt Disney Pictures), the astonishing new animated film from Japanese legend Hayao Miyazaki, I puzzled over how I'd ever be able to outline the movie's plot in review form.” There’s a goldfish-girl named Ponyo, or sometimes Brünnhilde, who lives in a bubble under the sea with her wizard father. Ponyo/Brünnhilde looks less like a goldfish than like a limbless doll in a dress and she’s always surrounded by a handful of baby sisters who look like miniature Ponyo copies, all who can transform whenever they want into a giant fish. Then one day Ponyo (Miley Cyrus's little sister, Noah Cyrus) swims on shore, drinks the blood of a human boy, falls in love with him, and decides she wants to be human…but her partly completed transformation somehow makes the ocean into pandemonium and causes the moon to get closer to the Earth, a wrong that can be corrected only by seeking the Goddess of the Ocean (Cate Blanchett) in an underwater nursing home.

Even that plot summary leaves out so many story threads, important characters, and visual prides (like the propeller-powered submarine that’s the wizard’s transportation, the hundreds of rainbow-colored jellyfish that Ponyo must swim through on her way to land, or the magic droplets that, when thrown on the ocean’s surface, turn into dangerous waves with eyes). Stevens said, “I walked out of the movie determined to dispense with plot altogether and publish a peremptory micro-review: "Just see Ponyo." But then I went home and told the story to my 3-year-old daughter, who immediately understood it (and who volunteered to right the sea's chaos herself as, without a trace of cognitive dissonance, she devoured a fish dinner).” Seeing how a child can understand the logic doesn’t mean that “Ponyo” is a kids’ movie. Actually, many of its themes and images may be too much for little kids. It means that Miyazaki is a master animator, able to get into a part of his mind that most grownups (including artists) have long ago lost. “Ponyo” is elaborately and generously weird, yet its story has a mythic cleanness: Boy meets fish-girl, boy loses fish-girl, fish-girl risks upsetting the cosmic order to go back to boy. Stevens said, “It's Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, with less sacrificial suffering and more ramen noodles.”

The undersea castle where Ponyo lives with her wizard father, voiced by Liam Neeson, is stunning in its beauty and difficulty, but the realistic world above sea level is no less carefully submitted. Sosuke (Frankie Jonas, the youngest of the Jonas Brothers, also was on the show "Jonas"), the little boy who becomes friends with Ponyo, lives in a house hanging on a cliff that seems to be there in permanent dialogue with the sea – sometimes literally, as when Sosuke’s sailor father, Koichi (Matt Damon), uses his ship’s light to send signals to Sosuke and his mother, Lisa (Tina Fey, sarcastically clever as always). Koichi travels so often that Lisa is, for all practical reasons, a single mother, overworked and cranky but devoted both to her son and to the old women at the retirement home where she works (a list of elderly women marvelously voiced by Lily Tomlin, Cloris Leachman and Betty White). The last thing Lisa needs is another child to care for, let alone one who’s able to create global weather uproars. When Ponyo, her fish-to-human transformation only half-completed, moves into their home against the wishes of her father, Lisa’s imagination and her son’s courage are put to the test.

“Ponyo” has stuff from both a classic fairy tale and an environmental message movie, but it changes as lightly between those genres as Ponyo herself does from person to goldfish and back again. Miyazaki’s look of the relationship between the human and underwater worlds is a thoughtful and confusing one. Though “Ponyo” is partly an environmental story, its message is more than just “Don’t litter, kids.” Ponyo’s love for Sosuke scares her environmentalist father, Fujimoto, who blames humans for polluting the world’s oceans. Stevens said, “But despite its sympathy with Fujimoto's cause, the movie ultimately comes down in favor of fish/human miscegenation.” Miyazaki, whose films often take place at the line between the human and the natural, has said that “we need courtesy toward water, mountains and air along with living things. We should not ask courtesy from these things, but we see ourselves should give courtesy to them instead.” In “Ponyo,” that courtesy is shown through love, not only between Sosuke and Ponyo but between the people of the earth and the fish of the sea.

If you haven’t seen this film, go and see it, it’s one of the best done by Miyazaki. Sure, it definitely is one of the weird films that Studio Ghibli has done, but that doesn’t negate the fact of how adorable and feel-good of a movie this is. Especially since the film’s message revolves around saving the sea life, which is really needed in today’s society. This is another one of my favorite Ghibli films and I highly recommend everyone to see it.

Alright everyone, stay tuned next Monday for not only the continuation of “Studio Ghibli Month,” but also on a Christmas movie that I think is really good and debatable on when you should see it.