Ponyo

Ponyo (***1/2)

Hayao Miyazaki is the greatest film animator of all time, and one of the greatest living directors of any kind, which is why Ponyo, which is a step or two below his absolute masterworks like and Spirited Away and Princess Mononoke, is still pretty damn good. The story is very simplistic, essentially a more Japan-ified retelling of The Little Mermaid, and it doesn't really build up to anything particularly powerful, at least compared to the two aforementioned movies. The animation, as is always the case with Miyazaki, is nothing short of stunning, however, and would make the movie worth watching even if its plot was a complete waste of time, which its not. The experience of a Miyazaki movie isn't quite like the experience of any other movie, animated or otherwise. No other movies are quite as imaginative, quite as immersive, or quite as engaging.

At the film's outset, we meet Ponyo, who the humans in the movie apparently mistake for a goldfish, although its more like a little creature with a human face and a disorganized red blob of a body. She has a whole school full of siblings, who inexplicably are a lot smaller than her and can't talk. Her father is Fujimoto, sort of an underwater version of Howl from Howl's Moving Castle, with very bishounen looking red hair running in every which direction. From what we gather, he's sort of the guardian of the ocean and spends most of his time brewing tinctures and complaining about how much the humans pollute. Ponyo, curious of the surface world, uses the transparent dome on top of a jellyfish-type creature to float up to dry land. Not really thinking the whole plan through, Ponyo nearly dies, being unable to breathe the air, but is saved by Soskue, a human boy who lives by the water. Sosuke keeps her in a bucket, names her Ponyo (her given name is Brunhilda), and shows her off to the old folks at the retirement home where his mother works, all of which thinks she's beautiful (but somehow not particularly out of the ordinary), except for one woman who in an apparent bout of senility warns that Ponyo will bring "the tsunami."

Fujimoto eventually manages to recapture Ponyo and brings her back down underwater, but during her surface world excursion, she healed a cut on Sosuke's finger and by tasting human blood she gains the ability to become human. Its not something she can do all at once. Her transformation takes great effort and she often winds up in this weird in-between stage where she has three-pronged bird-like appendages for feet and hands and a froggish looking face. Fujimoto attempts to trap Ponyo/Brunhilda in a magical bubble to stop the transformation and to keep her from escaping again, but she does escape again, with the help of her tiny mini-Ponyo siblings. She inadvertently steals some of the power from her father's elixirs, and rides her way back to the surface with the help of magical waves that are , comprised of this weird fusion of water and giant fish. The waves get out of control, and lo and behold, the old woman was right, and there actually is a tsunami. In fact, the moon is actually getting pulled closer to the earth ala Majora's Mask, only without the big angry face.

The movie is a little vague as to whether anyone actually gets killed, or whether there's as much major damage as it seems there should be in the storm. We see a group of fishing boats, including the one that Sosuke's father works on, being saved by Ponyo's mother, which they refer to when they see as the "goddess of mercy." The fates of the people at the old folks home, which Sosuke's mother rushes to go check on in the midst of the storm, is revealed much later in the movie and doesn't even really happen on screen. In the meantime, we basically get a lot of sight gags with Sosuke and Ponyo as she tries to adjust herself to the surface world. Its not that these scenes aren't cute, because they are, and show the heart that Miyazaki pours into all of his movies, but it kind of drains the movie of its central conflict, which is that Ponyo's desire to live in the real world conflicts with the natural order of things. There's a "test" that Fujimoto puts Sosuke and Ponyo through at the film's climax, but it doesn't really build up to anything tremendously dramatic, and what exactly is resolved at the end is kind of murky.

Even with the weaknesses of the story, however, there's no question that the movie is still a tremendously worthwhile experience. There really isn't anything quite like the hand-drawn animation of a Miyazaki movie, and giving him the ocean as a backdrop is almost unfair. The actual, factual ocean is filled with all manner of weird creatures to begin with, and when you let Miyazaki work his imagination on creating more magical versions of them, the results are incredible. Joe Hihashi, who has worked with Miyazaki on a plethora of his movies as a composer, creates another beautiful score here. The English language cast (the movie is only dubbed in theaters) does a pretty good job, notably Liam Niessan, who lends his boisterous, commanding voice to the character of Fujimoto. I can't imagine many people who have seen a lot of Miyazaki's work declaring this their favorite, but I also can't imagine many people finding a way to genuinely dislike it. Hayao Miyazaki has a skill of bringing out the inner child in people that no other working director--regardless of what medium, be it animation or live-action--really has. Even in a movie where the plot is somewhat murky and disjointed, its a lot of fun to watch.