Ponyo

Everything’s better down where it’s wetter in Hayao Miyazaki’s buckwild pseudo-retelling of The Little Mermaid.

“Ponyo loves ham!”

You can divide the works of legendary Japanese animation studio Ghibli into two camps: original stories and adaptations. It’s hard to really say whether one or the other has seen more success: for every Howl’s Moving Castle, there’s a My Neighbour Totoro. For every Tales from Earthsea, there’s a Mary and the Witch’s Flower. And then there are films like Spirited Away which, for all intents and purposes is sort of Miyazaki’s version of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Ponyo firmly fits in this third camp.                                                                                                                                  

Fujimoto is a wizard – formerly a human – who despises humanity and their filthy, polluting ways. He lives beneath the ocean with his myriad fish daughters. The largest one, Brunhilde, hitches a ride on a jellyfish as her father is doing some sort of fish magic. She is caught in a jar and is rescued by a little boy named Sosuke, who names her Ponyo. She licks his blood, which triggers her growth into a human and the development of her magical powers. Fujimoto sees the threat this causes for the world, and does everything he can to stop the moon from crashing into the earth.

Yeah… Ponyo is a very strange film. It’s arguably Studio Ghibli’s weirdest one. Movies like Spirited Away ease you into the fantastical, but Ponyo throws you into the deep end immediately with that bonkers, completely dialogue-free scene of a wizard standing atop a submarine, casting spells from the protection of a giant bubble while his tiny goldfish-human hybrid daughters watch on.

Visually Ponyo has some of the most interesting and also least unique designs. Fujimoto and the underwater world are imaginative, as are the many prehistoric ocean dwellers, the eyeball familiars, and Fujimoto’s wife: all bear great designs and emphasise the magical nature of their world. The human world, on the other hand, feels a bit less interesting. The town only really comes alive once the ocean takes over.

But it’s in this area between the mundane and the mad that Ponyo exists. Lisa, the stoic nearly-single mother, could be a stick in the mud and a boring character, but she has a lot going on, from taking her son seriously (a rare treat in a children’s film) to driving like an absolute madman whenever she gets in her car. Miyazaki likes to offer more than just a stereotypical view of its main characters, and even though the visuals of the human world are boring, at least the characters aren’t.

It’s impossible to hige from the fact that the film read so much like The Little Mermaid. Miyazaki himself expressed how he wished the main character “had a soul”, so there’s no doubt he was happy to make his own version. But in giving the main character a soul he also for whatever reason decided to ditch any logic or storytelling methods. Ponyo throws so much wacky nonsense at us, without any particular rhyme or reason. The Sea Witch takes Ariel’s voice for a well-established reason; Fujimoto is sort of a villain, but he also is the only one who makes any sense. The moon is crashing into the Earth and no one seems remotely bothered by it but him.

Ponyo needs to find true love (in the form of a five year old, no less), before her magic goes completely out of control, and none of this would have happened if she hadn’t drunk human blood. The movie is so cuckoo bananas, lavishing in some of the most gorgeously animated scenes of complete chaos, that it entirely forgets to tell anything resembling a cohesive story. It’s not a huge detractor: Ponyo effectively runs on chaos, and you effectively forgive it for not bothering with logic or pacing or anything remotely resembling a three act structure.

Ponyo is a fun movie. It’s by far and away not Miyazaki’s finest, but it has a unique charm that I don’t think is like any of the others he’s produced. It’s one of Ghibli’s black sheep, but like its titular character, that just makes it more interesting, and exceptionally endearing.

Verdict: Strikingly gorgeous and thoroughly nuts, Ponyo is a fairy tale not like the others.

Overall entertainment: 7/10
Violence: No way hundreds of people aren’t dead/10
Sex: Fujimoto can fucking get it/10
Animation 9/10
Goldfish: Does no one know what one looks like?
Sosuke: Why does he call his mother by her first name?
Town: So it’s in ruins, surely

Ponyo (2009)
Japanese

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Writer: Hayao Miyazaki

CAST

Ponyo – Yuuri Nara
Sosuke –  Hiroki Doi
Lisa – Tomoko Yamaguchi
Koichi –  Kzushige Nagashima
Gran Mamare – Yuki Amami
Fujimoto – George Tokoro
Ponyo’s sisters – Akiko Yano
Toki – Kazuko Yoshiyuki
Yoshie – Tomoko Naraoka
Noriko – Tokie Hidari