Director – Hayao Miyazaki – 2008 – Japan – Cert. U – 103m
*****
A girl fish spirit takes on human form to become a companion to a human boy – reviewed for Third Way, February 2010
Miyazaki’s animated filmography prior to international crossover item Spirited Away (2001) has scarcely graced UK screens, despite colossal success in his native Japan. Tragically, this includes much of his best work – such films as Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (1984), My Neighbour Totoro (1988) and Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989) – all released, happily, on posthumous UK DVD – beside which the more recent works pale. Until now: his latest film Ponyo compares favourably to those earlier works, just when one had given up hope he’d ever make another truly great film.
Loosely speaking, it’s Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid as eponymous underwater girl fish spirit Ponyo, rescued after being beached by small boy Sosuke then recaptured by her zealous, over-protective Sorcerer’s Apprentice magician-like father, decides she wants to return to shore and become a human girl companion to the boy. Sosuke lives with his mother Lisa in an isolated, coastal house, while his ship’s captain father Koichi is frequently absent due to work commitments. Lisa works in a care home for the elderly.
The settings and characters furnish their director with flights of fantasy and subtleties of observation comparable to that of his best works. Working mum Lisa bombs around recklessly in the small family car trying to get everything done, a trait paid off in spades during an incredible storm sequence where considerable quantities of seawater spill up the hillside onto the road.
Nor is this ordinary seawater: threatening dark gray waves, like elements from an Escher image, are actually the backs of gigantic schools of fish. Lisa drives Sosuke in the car while Ponyo, now a little girl, pursues him on the backs of the waves/fishes. Later, Miyazaki indulges a fetish for Pre-Cambrian aquatic life forms, which appear to fire up his creative juices in much the same way as did the flying machines in some of his earlier films.
Other moments are much quieter. Sosuke interacts with three old ladies in the care home, sequences which treat both young and aged protagonists with great respect to portray them with great dignity. Elsewhere, his mum, frustrated that her husband can’t get home for supper, lies in an alcoholic stupor on the bed while her son signals with a lamp to dad out at sea. Not for the first time, Miyazaki demonstrates his great gift for lovingly recreating the mundane details of ordinary, everyday life, which serve to make the fantastical elements of his film all the more effective.
In short, this is a return to form by one of animation’s masters. It’s being released in both English dubbed (voice direction by Pixar’s John Lasseter – and not bad at all) and subtitled Japanese versions; if you want the latter, you may have to search quite hard to find it.
Trailer (dubbed):