Review: Ponyo (Miyazaki Hayao)
Aug. 16th, 2009 08:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
nebroadweYesterday I took ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
nateprentice's kids to see the English dub of Ponyo at one of the art-house theaters downtown. (It was their first time in such a theater -- they found the upscale selection of treats at the concessions stand disappointing. :-) We all enjoyed the film thoroughly. The plot takes its inspiration from "The Little Mermaid," but you might as well ignore that -- this is not a story about romance, though it is a story about love. The plot, as somebody's review pointed out, is simple at base -- boy meets fish-girl, boy loses fish-girl, fish-girl returns, boy must prove himself worthy of her -- but like the Devonian creatures that accompany Ponyo into Sosuke's seaside town, it's big and fantastic and trails a not a few whiskery subplots that seem strange, taken on their own, but considered as part of the whole add to its charm.
This is a Ghibli film, so of course it looks gorgeous, but it's also a departure from their usual quasi-realistic approach to backgrounds and natural phenomena. I fell in love with Miyazaki's skies back in Princess Mononoke, with their Turneresque play of light and color, but there's none of that here. Ponyo's landscapes and seascapes have an illustrated feel to them. The palette is very bright, very bold, and heavy on the primary colors. Sosuke's house, school and town are presented as crayon drawings -- you can actually see the strokes. The heaving sea is all about color and shape rather than mimicking the movement of water. Ponyo, more so than any other work in Miyazaki's oeuvre, is a storybook brought to life. The character designs were typical Miyazaki (I caught a couple of familiar faces, as usual), but it's a testament to the stylistic flexibility of his approach to human (and animal) figures that they worked just as well against these suggestive backdrops as against the more fully-realized ones in his other films. (Aiding the characters' liveliness was the usual excellent Disney/Lasseter voice work: good actors well directed, from Liam Neeson and Tina Fey all the way down to Frankie Jonas and Noah Cyrus. Kudos!)
What really caught me about this film, though, is that it's one of the best encapsulations of the wonder of childhood ever. For Sosuke and Ponyo, nothing is fantastic because everything is strange and cool when you're experiencing it for the first time, whether it's a fish who turns into a girl or the miracle of instant ramen. My favorite scenes in the film, in fact, are the ones in which Ponyo eats dinner at Sosuke's house: the simple pleasures of light, warmth, food and drink were seldom better represented. Equally well-represented is a childlike attitude toward love -- it's no stretch to believe that Sosuke loves "all the Ponyos" (fish, girl, half-and-half creature) if you've ever watched a little kid hugging his or her parents, pets and stuffed animals with similar happy abandon. Only with age do we begin to discriminate among our affections; the slightly troubled relationship between Sosuke's mother and father (besides giving rise to one of the funniest scenes in the film, as an irked Lisa Morse-codes her seafaring husband to "BUG OFF BUG OFF BUG OFF BUG OFF" as he attempts to apologize for taking a job without warning her) makes for a brilliant but not overstated contrast of experience against innocence.
In short, highly recommended, particularly if you have a child to entertain for a couple of hours. The storm section midway through is scary-exciting, but otherwise there's nothing to trouble a younger viewer and much to entertain her. I think Up will actually have some competition for the animation Oscar this year ...
nateprentice's kids to see the English dub of Ponyo at one of the art-house theaters downtown. (It was their first time in such a theater -- they found the upscale selection of treats at the concessions stand disappointing. :-) We all enjoyed the film thoroughly. The plot takes its inspiration from "The Little Mermaid," but you might as well ignore that -- this is not a story about romance, though it is a story about love. The plot, as somebody's review pointed out, is simple at base -- boy meets fish-girl, boy loses fish-girl, fish-girl returns, boy must prove himself worthy of her -- but like the Devonian creatures that accompany Ponyo into Sosuke's seaside town, it's big and fantastic and trails a not a few whiskery subplots that seem strange, taken on their own, but considered as part of the whole add to its charm.This is a Ghibli film, so of course it looks gorgeous, but it's also a departure from their usual quasi-realistic approach to backgrounds and natural phenomena. I fell in love with Miyazaki's skies back in Princess Mononoke, with their Turneresque play of light and color, but there's none of that here. Ponyo's landscapes and seascapes have an illustrated feel to them. The palette is very bright, very bold, and heavy on the primary colors. Sosuke's house, school and town are presented as crayon drawings -- you can actually see the strokes. The heaving sea is all about color and shape rather than mimicking the movement of water. Ponyo, more so than any other work in Miyazaki's oeuvre, is a storybook brought to life. The character designs were typical Miyazaki (I caught a couple of familiar faces, as usual), but it's a testament to the stylistic flexibility of his approach to human (and animal) figures that they worked just as well against these suggestive backdrops as against the more fully-realized ones in his other films. (Aiding the characters' liveliness was the usual excellent Disney/Lasseter voice work: good actors well directed, from Liam Neeson and Tina Fey all the way down to Frankie Jonas and Noah Cyrus. Kudos!)
What really caught me about this film, though, is that it's one of the best encapsulations of the wonder of childhood ever. For Sosuke and Ponyo, nothing is fantastic because everything is strange and cool when you're experiencing it for the first time, whether it's a fish who turns into a girl or the miracle of instant ramen. My favorite scenes in the film, in fact, are the ones in which Ponyo eats dinner at Sosuke's house: the simple pleasures of light, warmth, food and drink were seldom better represented. Equally well-represented is a childlike attitude toward love -- it's no stretch to believe that Sosuke loves "all the Ponyos" (fish, girl, half-and-half creature) if you've ever watched a little kid hugging his or her parents, pets and stuffed animals with similar happy abandon. Only with age do we begin to discriminate among our affections; the slightly troubled relationship between Sosuke's mother and father (besides giving rise to one of the funniest scenes in the film, as an irked Lisa Morse-codes her seafaring husband to "BUG OFF BUG OFF BUG OFF BUG OFF" as he attempts to apologize for taking a job without warning her) makes for a brilliant but not overstated contrast of experience against innocence.
In short, highly recommended, particularly if you have a child to entertain for a couple of hours. The storm section midway through is scary-exciting, but otherwise there's nothing to trouble a younger viewer and much to entertain her. I think Up will actually have some competition for the animation Oscar this year ...