Adrift on the Water: Ponyo Review

I continue my Studio Ghibli retrospective with a look at Ponyo.

Studio Ghibli, as a globally preeminent maker of animated features, inevitably invites comparisons with Disney. Perhaps no Ghibli movie invites such comparisons more than Ponyo (2008), or Ponyo on the Cliff, as its original Japanese title goes.

Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, Ponyo is the Ghibli take on Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of the Little Mermaid, a tale also tackled by the House of Mouse. Both Ponyo and Disney’s The Little Mermaid follow an aquatic heroine, whose father is a powerful figure in the world beneath the seas, as she tries to live on land as a human and forms a powerful emotional bond with a male human.

Each studio’s version of the story has its creator’s distinctive stamp. The Little Mermaid was made according to Disney’s long-standing Princess Movie template: it has an adolescent female protagonist finding her way in life, a love interest, a villain, cute animal sidekicks, Broadway-style musical numbers, and a climactic showdown.

Meanwhile, Ponyo was made, if not precisely according to a template, then certainly with features common to Ghibli, and Miyazaki, movies. The main characters are very young children rather than adolescents, and thus their bond is more proto-romantic. Ponyo has no villain, no musical numbers, no big climax. The movie’s focus is more on the beauty of the natural world, on sea and land, and lots of nice little moments. Although the movie does have cute—and not-so-cute—animal sidekicks.

Both studios’ approaches also suffer from their own characteristic weaknesses. Disney’s template risks producing movies that feel synthetic and by-the-numbers (you can almost hear the exec saying “OK, do we have a Gloating Villain Song yet? Have we filled the quota of licensable sidekicks?”). In contrast, the distinctive Ghibli approach, which frequently prioritizes beauty and emotion over obvious conflict, risks producing meandering movies with little dramatic momentum. These dangers of Ghibli-style storytelling, which were successfully avoided in other movies, I fear become all too apparent in Ponyo.

Ponyo contains much to admire. The visuals are as good and inventive as ever. I liked the heroine and hero and appreciated many individual scenes and moments. The movie is dramatically slack, though, and has a resolution so underwhelming as to make one positively long for a battle with a sea witch or the like. Ponyo has the dubious distinction of being the first Miyazaki movie where I found myself growing slightly bored while watching it.

The movie opens with a dazzling, almost completely silent, undersea sequence where we watch a swarming array of fish and other life beneath the waves.

We then zero in on Fujimoto, a humanoid, flamboyantly eccentric-looking wizard who prowls the ocean aboard a submersible craft propelled by flipper-like oars.

Fujimoto has an aquarium full of his offspring, who are meant to be fish but are animated to look rather like little girls in red dresses. The largest, presumably most mature, of these daughters is an adventurous sort and she ventures outside Fujimoto’s craft into the wider ocean.

In the ocean, she gets stuck in a glass bottle, washes ashore, and is rescued from the bottle by a five-year-old boy named Sosuke. Sosuke lives in a coastal house with his mother, who works at a nearby nursing home. The boy is delighted by this new marine friend, whom he dubs “Ponyo,” and takes to carrying her around everywhere in his water pail.

For her part, Ponyo gets to like Sosuke, human food, and life on land in general. She eventually draws on her father’s magic to become a human girl and tries to stay with Sosuke in this form. However, the magic has unintended consequences: the ocean waters threaten the coastal region and portend global environmental disaster. Fujimoto and Ponyo’s mother, a sea goddess-like being named Granmamare, must figure out how to prevent their daughter from overturning the balance of nature.

As I said, Ponyo has plenty to enjoy. I liked the plethora of sea creatures we see throughout the movie: fish, octopi, crabs, jellyfish, and a whale are all on display. These creatures are constantly popping up in the background or corners of shots, unnoticed and uncommented on, giving a constant sense of the abundance of life in the ocean.

Further, the movie makes the ocean water a character in its own right (rather as Disney’s Moana did some years later). At several points, ocean waves take on lives of their own, sprouting eyes and moving with clear direction and purpose. A moment where these living waves follow Sosuke up the seashore provides a striking, rather creepy, image.

I also liked the rendering of Ponyo’s innumerable tiny sisters, who look like girls while behaving like a school of fish, moving as one and pushing and nuzzling against various objects. The sisters also provide the movie’s most goofy yet grandiose scene, where they morph into gigantic fish and carry the newly human Ponyo to the surface of the ocean. Composer Joe Hisaishi’s choice to score this scene with a parody of Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” only adds to the humor.

The portrayal of life on land also has its delights. Many scenes with Sosuke and his mother, Lisa, have that domestic warmth Ghibli excels in. Quiet moments where Lisa introduces Ponyo to such human foods as warm milk with honey and instant noodles with ham and eggs are lovely and capture the pleasures of eating simple foods at home. Life by the seashore has seldom seemed cozier than here.

Scenes at the nursing home, whose residents regard Lisa and Sosuke with affection, have a similar gentle, kindly atmosphere—while also once again showing the crucial place older women play in Ghibli movies.

Above all, I liked the characters of Sosuke and Ponyo. Sosuke in particular stands out for his pure, single-minded devotion to others. He finds Ponyo and then dedicates himself to taking care of her. He comforts his mother when she gets distressed over the prolonged absences of her husband, a ship’s captain. He tries to act as a bridge between his parents by sending messages to his father when Lisa is too upset to communicate anything but her annoyance. Such kindness might come across as cloying or unbelievable in another context but here Sosuke’s behavior is so simple and unselfconscious as to avoid sentimentality.

I also appreciated how Sosuke follows the kind of careful logic that kids can display. He initially brings Ponyo, still in her bucket, to his school. Then he considers that the teacher might not like him bringing a fish to school and hides the bucket in some bushes. Then he worries that a cat might find the bucket and covers it with a branch.

Like Sosuke, Ponyo can be kind. We get a nice scene where she shows concern for a fussy baby and tries to help him as Sosuke helped her. Later, she comforts a crying Sosuke, even though she doesn’t quite understand his human emotional reactions. However, she is also more boisterous, and occasionally mischievous, than Sosuke. When Ponyo, in her human form, first sees Sosuke she gives him a big clinging hug that almost knocks him over. She also shows a fish-like tendency to spew water at those who annoy her.

All this is sweet and cute, but can’t cover up the movie’s plot-level problems. Even as Miyazaki and his team give us moments of marine beauty and human kindness, the fact remains that often the movie is just (no pun intended) treading water. Scenes go by with little actually “happening,” and this gets a bit tedious after a while. This problem is especially noticeable in a later passage of the movie where Ponyo and Sosuke travel around the coastal community in a little boat.

Even when the movie’s plot does advance, these developments aren’t handled very well. Lisa’s behavior is puzzling: she makes multiple questionable decisions that could place her son in danger. Other adults seem similarly unconcerned about the kids’ safety, allowing Ponyo and Sosuke to roam around by themselves in a badly flooded area with not a murmur of concern. We get no real justification for this odd behavior by Lisa and the other adults apart from “It’s necessary to get us to the next plot point.”

However, the biggest plot problem is the story’s resolution. [SPOILER ALERT] Late in the movie, we learn from Fujimoto and Granmamare that preventing global catastrophe and saving Ponyo’s life requires Sosuke to demonstrate his love for Ponyo.

As challenges that a hero must overcome go, this one is pretty weak. From the first act of the movie onward, Sosuke has consistently demonstrated his dedication to Ponyo and given us little reason to doubt that he will rise to the occasion. Perhaps if showing love for Ponyo required Sosuke to make some type of sacrifice then this scenario could generate real suspense. That is not the case here, though: all Sosuke needs to do is… verbally tell Granmamare that he will always love Ponyo. And that’s it; the problem is solved and disaster is averted. Rarely has the fate of the world felt so low stakes. And I apologize to Spirited Away for ever calling it’s ending anti-climactic.

Ponyo’s English dub is fine. Noah Cyrus (of the Cyrus musical family fame) and Frankie Jonas (of the Jonas Brothers fame) give nicely sincere, un-cutesy vocal performances as Ponyo and Sosuke. Tina Fey does a good job as Lisa, alternately affectionate or irritable as the situation requires. The most entertaining vocal performance is from Liam Neeson as Fujimoto. Neeson’s harried delivery as the wizard seeking to recover his daughter gives Ponyo the feel of a light-hearted, kids’ version of Taken. As Granmamare, Cate Blanchett gives an ethereal, Galadriel-esque performance.

My choice for favorite image in Ponyo would be a toss-up between two shots. One is an underwater shot, both funny and fuzzily beautiful, of Ponyo and Sosuke peering down into the recently flooded area around Sosuke’s house. The other is the ominous image of the two kids slowly proceeding down a long dark passage.

My choice for favorite humanizing detail would be another toss-up between two details, both involving Sosuke. I like the crab-like way the boy walks sideways while navigating the rocks on the seashore. I also like how, when Ponyo gives him her giant hug, he slides backwards on his toes. And I must give an honorable mention to the wonderfully fish-like way Ponyo shows affection by nuzzling her face against others’ faces.

In closing, I think Ponyo demonstrates something I already suspected about Miyazaki: for all his undoubted skill with memorable little moments, he can sometimes flail about a bit when it comes to telling a complete, satisfying story. In other movies he has been able to overcome or at least compensate for this weakness. Here, though, I think he ended up in the drink.