Ponyo

Review: Ponyo

Japan, 2008, cert U, Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. 100 minutes. Cast: Liam Neeson, Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Noah Lindsey Cyrus, Frankie Jonas

The downside to being a bona fide genius with a reputation for producing masterpieces is that your audience becomes spoiled. Miyazaki’s latest is lovely. Of course.

Sosuke (Jonas) is a little boy who lives with his mother on a cliff by the sea. It’s not just any sea, of course; it’s Miyazaki’s sea, the most vibrantly animated ocean I’ve seen since Monstro the whale swallowed Pinocchio. It’s not Disney’s sea, which as we know is full to the gills with calypso crabs, cute clownfish and Angela Lansbury, but a foaming blue maelstrom of frightening beauty. Miyazaki, famous for his love of the sky, has turned his hand to the ocean with breathtaking results. This sea is also home to Sosuke’s father (Damon), captain of a ship, and to Ponyo, who is... less easily defined.

Ponyo (Cyrus) is some kind of humanoid goldfish girl who happens upon Sosuke one day while he’s playing by the shore. Picking her up in his plastic bucket, Sosuke immediately and unquestioningly falls in love with Ponyo, and the two embark on a thoroughly trippy adventure. Sosuke and Ponyo love eachother with a childish intensity that is both moderately insane and positively enchanting. The film doesn’t try to do anything terribly complicated, but it doesn’t need to; for one thing, it’s aimed at a very young but very lucky audience. Ponyo is such a visually rich movie that kids will be absorbed right from the opening credits (as always with Ghibli films these are a delight). It’s the cinematic equivalent of being wrapped up in a warm blanket, a world in which the most mundane sequences are so lovingly rendered that it’s impossible not be swept up. Whether it’s Sosuke’s father telling his wife that he loves her by blinking a morse code message across the dark sea, or Ponyo messily eating noodles for the first time, the film manages to inject tangible joy into every scene. Every scrap of Sosuke’s little town is brought to life by the film’s meticulous attention to detail, and the result is a world you could almost reach out and touch. There’s a wonderful honesty at work in these simple sequences that almost outshines the raging sea just beyond Sosuke’s garden fence.

Ponyo’s dad (Liam Neeson) is an ill-defined sea wizard straight out of Yellow Submarine, and her mother (Cate Blanchett) is a 100 foot tall ocean goddess, the story revolving around Ponyo’s wish to become human so that she can be with Sosuke. There’s no great philosophical battle here - she simply wants it with a mad, childish zeal that is all too familiar to anyone who has kids. Sosuke too acts like a real five year old, and typically of a Miyazaki hero learns self-reliance and responsibility in the course of his loopy escapades.

Impressively for such a weird movie, Ponyo doesn’t talk down to kids... but it sure isn’t afraid to baffle them. As with Howl’s Moving Castle, story takes a back seat to the awesome visuals. That’s the one downside to Ponyo, and it’s one I saw coming; a lot of it just doesn’t make much sense. The third act is simply mystifying, and like Howl the film ends so abruptly you’ll walk out wondering who decided to cut the last 20 minutes. It’d be more tolerable if we hadn’t already seen that Miyazaki is more than capable of weaving a great story into his gorgeous imagery (Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke). But it’s entirely possible that there’s a sublime kiddie logic at work here that’s lost on an old guy like me.

If you know who Miyazaki is, you’ll be seeing this movie regardless. If you don’t, Ponyo will show you why you should. He builds worlds of such texture and substance that they dizzy the senses, even if they’re not always the most accessible. Dive in.

7/10

-James