When my niece was three years old, I thought she would love Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo (崖の上のポニョ, 2008). She is five years old now and I was right.
In fairness to my niece, I don't see what's not to love about a version of Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" that valorizes transformation over tragedy and adds Devonian sea life. The original tale is a thesis on the impossibility of love across boundaries; the film is an affirmation of that love, whether separated by species, schedules, generations, or philosophy. It never condescends to its younger audience or winks at their expense at its older one. It has room in the same story for the quotidian details of working-class life in a fishing port and the numinous near-miss of the moon falling out of the sky. That it is spellbindingly and ingeniously hand-animated isn't icing, it's the microexpressive cake; I had remembered the luminous plankton-fall of the prologue and the fish-bodied Valkyrie-surge of the tsunami as terrifying and exuberant as anything by Hokusai, but forgot until it was too late that the shimmer of hand-drawn fat across the surface of a bowl of soup would make me want ramen as badly as Tampopo (1985). Fortunately my niece seemed content with her thematically inapropos Chinese takeout, mostly crab rangoon; she exclaimed, "Like me!" as soon as she registered the age of the protagonists and asked all the right questions at narratively significant moments, like what one character's parent was doing when we couldn't see them or whether the people at the nursing home were okay. I don't know what she made of the environmental message, of human wastefulness with the sea and the value of beautiful things that can whelm and destroy you, but she thought the roiling, trash-laden mud of the dredge that almost catches Ponyo on her maiden voyage away from her overprotective father's house—and does leave her stoppered into a glass jar, a little red-and-white human-faced fish tumbling in the shallow tide until rescued by a curious human child, picking his way down the rocks with his toy boat in his arms—was gross. She was sufficiently interested by the ancient seaway the mountain road turns into after the magical overspill of the second-act storm that I am thinking of purchasing her an appropriate Paleozoic Pal. When it came time to hug everyone goodnight after the movie, she cannoned into us with the ferocious affection of Ponyo herself, an unstoppable force of nature that just happens to look like a brightly colored, cheerfully fearless five-year-old girl. I can think of many worse role models.
Ponyo was not the first Miyazaki I ever saw—that was Spirited Away (2001), shown me by the same friend a few years earlier—but it may be the one I love best, partly for its refutation of Andersen, partly for its families, partly for the sea. I am aware it's not the most adult or complex of his movies, but I don't see why it needs to be. It has a plot that a five-year-old can follow; its logic is half fairy tale, half dream, so that we accept Ponyo's insatiable curiosity for the human world just as we accept that her joyous breakout from the waves throws the balance of nature so cosmically awry that while two new best friends doze together like puppies on a couch, one red-haired and full of sea-magic, the other black-haired and being brave in the absence of his mom, the sky is already streaking with falling satellites and the moon has drawn so close to the earth that the tides harden like a mountain against the horizon, a fleet's worth of trawlers and tankers helplessly jumbled up into the dark water like a shipwrecked city. But we accept it partly because her friendship with Sosuke is so immediate, so intense, and so much of its age that it's no strain on any logic that she would stretch herself first into an amphibious form and then into full human semblance to meet him on land, where they can share tea and ramen and the exciting responsibility of helping Sosuke's mother batten down the house to wait out the blackout of a storm. The next morning they set out together across the sea-changed ancient new world of armored fish and eurypterids gliding past drowned radio aerials and traffic barriers, just as inseparable as when he carried her in a green plastic pail to school. They are wonderful child heroes, not miniature adults or projections of innocence. Sosuke bursts into shocked tears when the golden-eyed sea-elementals of Ponyo's father steal back his new friend in a churning, slithering implosion of sentient tide. Her first night ashore, Ponyo clutches the storm lantern atop her head like an incandescent hat and rockets across all the furniture shrieking, "Ham!" They pack for their sea-journey as seriously as children in a game of running away and they point out prehistoric fish by name as they travel. And we accept that the attachment is not one-way: that Sosuke who carefully placed a leafy branch over a pail in case any cats came prowling, who recognized his "goldfish" in the red-haired girl who raced the backs of living waves to find him, can be trusted to answer correctly the question that will give her a life on land, without which she'll turn to the sea foam we all came from. "It's the old magic, you know."
Ponyo is also the reason I am actually puzzled that Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle (2004) diverges so strongly from the original Diana Wynne Jones, because as a story it is extremely DWJ. Fujimoto in particular could have stepped directly out of one or more of her novels, semi-bishounen stressbasket of mad science wizardry and helicopter parenting that he is. Of course I liked him the moment I saw him, standing at the bow of his submarine with his anemone-mane of hair and his incongruous cricket blazer, pouring his elixirs of renewal into the sea—diatoms and jellyfish bloom around him, trilobites crawl across the barnacle-roughened, starfish-clustered hull, and a great squid goes by in the gilded abyss, its mantle rippling with greeting colors which this lanky, dandyish figure hastily answers once he's fished his flashlight out of the last pocket he thought to check, accidentally flashing himself in the face as he puts it away; right from the start he's both magician and fool and he will be the closest thing this story has to an antagonist, a high-strung Prospero of the undersea coping even more clumsily than usual with a daughter chafing to see for herself the world her father renounced. In Miyazaki's environmentally minded universe, he can't be a villain with his sympathetic and sensible love of the sea and his disgust with human mistreatment of it, but he certainly can't be a hero when his protectiveness for his charges, whether the shoal of baby-faced goldfish he's fathered with the Kannon-like sea-goddess Granmamare or the wider ocean itself, manifests by squashing his rebellious eldest daughter into a younger, more controllable form or preparing to wash away all human life on earth. Naturally his opposite number is Lisa, another effectively single parent with an oft-absent spouse; impulsive and expressive, she drives like she never heard of a license, drinks beer and flops off beds at the end of a long day as a caregiver, and yells at her husband via signal lamp ("BAKA BAKA BAKA BAKA BAKA") when his work as captain of the Koganei Maru keeps him from coming home as planned. She's a terrific mother. Another film might offer her decision to leave two children alone in a house during an emergency as evidence of her negligence; this one recognizes it as a gesture of responsibility, trusting Sosuke to stay where she's made sure it's safe while she packs the car with blankets and provisions and heads for the senior center in need on the far side of the blacked-out island. By contrast, Fujimoto frets so much about his daughters, he keeps them in a literal bubble from which only Ponyo's burgeoning powers, boosted by the taste of human blood and human food, can liberate them in an explosion of wild magic and weather. The script never demonizes him, but it doesn't give him an easy time. His character design incorporates a trick that I have seen often with human actors, but rarely with animated ones: from some angles he's beautiful, as wild and remote as the goddess for whom he changed his life, and just as often he looks like a beaky, harassed middle-aged man whose high-femme makeup mostly emphasizes all his anxious lines. His backstory is as obviously dramatic as whatever accident or experimentation took Howell Jenkins from a doctoral thesis on charms and spells in Wales to a full-time career as the devastatingly vain Wizard Howl in Ingary and it is about as relevant to Ponyo as the other is to Sophie:
"Human? What's good about such a foolish, horrid species? All they do is to take life out of the ocean. I was once, long ago, a human myself. You have no idea what it took to give up being human—"
"I want hands!"
A similar exposition of his sorcerous plans is bumped to earth by the fix-it realities of home: "Yes. I can feel the power of the ocean in the furthest reaches of my DNA. When this well is full, then the age of the ocean will begin again. An explosion of life to match the Cambrian Age. An end to the era of those abominable humans . . . This cursed door." But then there is always something mundane in the magical world, just as there is always something magical in the mundane, or perhaps what matters is where you're looking from. Instant ramen is a miracle to Ponyo, transforming in three minutes from bland crunchy bits and boiling water to fragrant, steaming noodles with slices of ham and scallion and soft-boiled egg. Tea was just as enchanting and so were the mechanical processes of starting the generator and tuning the radio. She's used to a house like a reef or a sunken ruin, on a plateau of seagrass that might once have been a submarine volcano; a house of sliding glass doors and checked tablecloths, on a cliff above the sea where the wind always rustles the trees and ripples the hillside, is exotic. Meeting them both for the first time, the viewer might notice that Fujimoto and Lisa seem to share a taste for books and clutter, though she's cleared room on her desk for a shortwave set and a computer and his technology runs to microscopes and alchemical glassware; his latest batches of elixir are overflowing the refrigerator and she's shoved all her son's toys into a sort of arrested landslide in the corner of his room. The most important exchange in the film will take place on land and under sea, a visual reinforcement of the liminal moral. The worlds merge, but they always mirrored.
For the record, Fujimoto is just about the only character from media I have ever considered cosplaying. It is probably never going to happen—I wouldn't mind owning a striped boating blazer and the gold ear-bobs wouldn't be too hard to get hold of, but my experiences with makeup have traditionally ended in allergies and here it seems non-negotiable.![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
gaudior once suggested, and I see no reason to disagree, that Fujimoto styles himself after his wife because she is a goddess and he is her devotee; in that case his unruly, somewhat tendrilly red hair may be as close as even an ex-human can manage to her endless coral-colored billows. I enjoy the way it bristles out suddenly, catlike, when he's startled or especially stressed, which in all honesty doesn't take much. We only see them together in one scene, but it seems characteristic of their relationship that while Fujimoto is bugging out over falling stars and rising tides, Granmamare simply folds one translucent hand around him, gently containing her husband as he blinks apprehensively: "Be calm, my dear." I have no doubt that his transition from humanity was as complicated as he intimates, but for his daughter it's as simple and perilous as being loved for who she is. "I love Ponyo as a fish, half-fish, and fully human. I love her in all her forms." Under the pastel scroll of the end credits, he's glimpsed with his submarine topside and shining like a lighthouse among storm-darkened waves; perhaps he is finding a less apocalyptic way to ease the interactions of humans with the sea. His daughters are growing up and so must he.
I saw this film originally in Japanese with subtitles; with my niece we watched the English dub. I don't have much to say about it except that it seems to have been cast with an ear to matching voice types and at no point did I feel it went wildly off script. Noah Cyrus and Frankie Jonas are not cloying as Ponyo and Sosuke; I feel the goddess-casting of Cate Blanchett might have been a little too on the nose, but I like Tina Fey as Lisa, kind of immature and yet loving and courageous; Liam Neeson made a surprisingly effective Fujimoto, although I missed the original actor's ability to skid from forbidding misanthropy to dignity-shredding wail at the drop of an amphora. My mother loved that the old ladies at the senior center were voiced by Cloris Leachman, Betty White, and Lily Tomlin. Technically Matt Damon was in this movie, but mostly he was away at sea. When she's older, my niece can form her own opinions about sub vs. dub; for now it just makes me happy that she responded so strongly to the movie. I would have loved it when I was her age. Instead I imprinted on Splash (1984) and spent years of baths willing my skin to crinkle into salt-crisped scales, a fin to unfurl where my feet had been, exactly the opposite trajectory of Ponyo. I feel that when her father named her Brunhilde, he should really have expected at least a little chaos. This sea-change brought to you by my caring backers at Patreon.
In fairness to my niece, I don't see what's not to love about a version of Andersen's "The Little Mermaid" that valorizes transformation over tragedy and adds Devonian sea life. The original tale is a thesis on the impossibility of love across boundaries; the film is an affirmation of that love, whether separated by species, schedules, generations, or philosophy. It never condescends to its younger audience or winks at their expense at its older one. It has room in the same story for the quotidian details of working-class life in a fishing port and the numinous near-miss of the moon falling out of the sky. That it is spellbindingly and ingeniously hand-animated isn't icing, it's the microexpressive cake; I had remembered the luminous plankton-fall of the prologue and the fish-bodied Valkyrie-surge of the tsunami as terrifying and exuberant as anything by Hokusai, but forgot until it was too late that the shimmer of hand-drawn fat across the surface of a bowl of soup would make me want ramen as badly as Tampopo (1985). Fortunately my niece seemed content with her thematically inapropos Chinese takeout, mostly crab rangoon; she exclaimed, "Like me!" as soon as she registered the age of the protagonists and asked all the right questions at narratively significant moments, like what one character's parent was doing when we couldn't see them or whether the people at the nursing home were okay. I don't know what she made of the environmental message, of human wastefulness with the sea and the value of beautiful things that can whelm and destroy you, but she thought the roiling, trash-laden mud of the dredge that almost catches Ponyo on her maiden voyage away from her overprotective father's house—and does leave her stoppered into a glass jar, a little red-and-white human-faced fish tumbling in the shallow tide until rescued by a curious human child, picking his way down the rocks with his toy boat in his arms—was gross. She was sufficiently interested by the ancient seaway the mountain road turns into after the magical overspill of the second-act storm that I am thinking of purchasing her an appropriate Paleozoic Pal. When it came time to hug everyone goodnight after the movie, she cannoned into us with the ferocious affection of Ponyo herself, an unstoppable force of nature that just happens to look like a brightly colored, cheerfully fearless five-year-old girl. I can think of many worse role models.
Ponyo was not the first Miyazaki I ever saw—that was Spirited Away (2001), shown me by the same friend a few years earlier—but it may be the one I love best, partly for its refutation of Andersen, partly for its families, partly for the sea. I am aware it's not the most adult or complex of his movies, but I don't see why it needs to be. It has a plot that a five-year-old can follow; its logic is half fairy tale, half dream, so that we accept Ponyo's insatiable curiosity for the human world just as we accept that her joyous breakout from the waves throws the balance of nature so cosmically awry that while two new best friends doze together like puppies on a couch, one red-haired and full of sea-magic, the other black-haired and being brave in the absence of his mom, the sky is already streaking with falling satellites and the moon has drawn so close to the earth that the tides harden like a mountain against the horizon, a fleet's worth of trawlers and tankers helplessly jumbled up into the dark water like a shipwrecked city. But we accept it partly because her friendship with Sosuke is so immediate, so intense, and so much of its age that it's no strain on any logic that she would stretch herself first into an amphibious form and then into full human semblance to meet him on land, where they can share tea and ramen and the exciting responsibility of helping Sosuke's mother batten down the house to wait out the blackout of a storm. The next morning they set out together across the sea-changed ancient new world of armored fish and eurypterids gliding past drowned radio aerials and traffic barriers, just as inseparable as when he carried her in a green plastic pail to school. They are wonderful child heroes, not miniature adults or projections of innocence. Sosuke bursts into shocked tears when the golden-eyed sea-elementals of Ponyo's father steal back his new friend in a churning, slithering implosion of sentient tide. Her first night ashore, Ponyo clutches the storm lantern atop her head like an incandescent hat and rockets across all the furniture shrieking, "Ham!" They pack for their sea-journey as seriously as children in a game of running away and they point out prehistoric fish by name as they travel. And we accept that the attachment is not one-way: that Sosuke who carefully placed a leafy branch over a pail in case any cats came prowling, who recognized his "goldfish" in the red-haired girl who raced the backs of living waves to find him, can be trusted to answer correctly the question that will give her a life on land, without which she'll turn to the sea foam we all came from. "It's the old magic, you know."
Ponyo is also the reason I am actually puzzled that Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle (2004) diverges so strongly from the original Diana Wynne Jones, because as a story it is extremely DWJ. Fujimoto in particular could have stepped directly out of one or more of her novels, semi-bishounen stressbasket of mad science wizardry and helicopter parenting that he is. Of course I liked him the moment I saw him, standing at the bow of his submarine with his anemone-mane of hair and his incongruous cricket blazer, pouring his elixirs of renewal into the sea—diatoms and jellyfish bloom around him, trilobites crawl across the barnacle-roughened, starfish-clustered hull, and a great squid goes by in the gilded abyss, its mantle rippling with greeting colors which this lanky, dandyish figure hastily answers once he's fished his flashlight out of the last pocket he thought to check, accidentally flashing himself in the face as he puts it away; right from the start he's both magician and fool and he will be the closest thing this story has to an antagonist, a high-strung Prospero of the undersea coping even more clumsily than usual with a daughter chafing to see for herself the world her father renounced. In Miyazaki's environmentally minded universe, he can't be a villain with his sympathetic and sensible love of the sea and his disgust with human mistreatment of it, but he certainly can't be a hero when his protectiveness for his charges, whether the shoal of baby-faced goldfish he's fathered with the Kannon-like sea-goddess Granmamare or the wider ocean itself, manifests by squashing his rebellious eldest daughter into a younger, more controllable form or preparing to wash away all human life on earth. Naturally his opposite number is Lisa, another effectively single parent with an oft-absent spouse; impulsive and expressive, she drives like she never heard of a license, drinks beer and flops off beds at the end of a long day as a caregiver, and yells at her husband via signal lamp ("BAKA BAKA BAKA BAKA BAKA") when his work as captain of the Koganei Maru keeps him from coming home as planned. She's a terrific mother. Another film might offer her decision to leave two children alone in a house during an emergency as evidence of her negligence; this one recognizes it as a gesture of responsibility, trusting Sosuke to stay where she's made sure it's safe while she packs the car with blankets and provisions and heads for the senior center in need on the far side of the blacked-out island. By contrast, Fujimoto frets so much about his daughters, he keeps them in a literal bubble from which only Ponyo's burgeoning powers, boosted by the taste of human blood and human food, can liberate them in an explosion of wild magic and weather. The script never demonizes him, but it doesn't give him an easy time. His character design incorporates a trick that I have seen often with human actors, but rarely with animated ones: from some angles he's beautiful, as wild and remote as the goddess for whom he changed his life, and just as often he looks like a beaky, harassed middle-aged man whose high-femme makeup mostly emphasizes all his anxious lines. His backstory is as obviously dramatic as whatever accident or experimentation took Howell Jenkins from a doctoral thesis on charms and spells in Wales to a full-time career as the devastatingly vain Wizard Howl in Ingary and it is about as relevant to Ponyo as the other is to Sophie:
"Human? What's good about such a foolish, horrid species? All they do is to take life out of the ocean. I was once, long ago, a human myself. You have no idea what it took to give up being human—"
"I want hands!"
A similar exposition of his sorcerous plans is bumped to earth by the fix-it realities of home: "Yes. I can feel the power of the ocean in the furthest reaches of my DNA. When this well is full, then the age of the ocean will begin again. An explosion of life to match the Cambrian Age. An end to the era of those abominable humans . . . This cursed door." But then there is always something mundane in the magical world, just as there is always something magical in the mundane, or perhaps what matters is where you're looking from. Instant ramen is a miracle to Ponyo, transforming in three minutes from bland crunchy bits and boiling water to fragrant, steaming noodles with slices of ham and scallion and soft-boiled egg. Tea was just as enchanting and so were the mechanical processes of starting the generator and tuning the radio. She's used to a house like a reef or a sunken ruin, on a plateau of seagrass that might once have been a submarine volcano; a house of sliding glass doors and checked tablecloths, on a cliff above the sea where the wind always rustles the trees and ripples the hillside, is exotic. Meeting them both for the first time, the viewer might notice that Fujimoto and Lisa seem to share a taste for books and clutter, though she's cleared room on her desk for a shortwave set and a computer and his technology runs to microscopes and alchemical glassware; his latest batches of elixir are overflowing the refrigerator and she's shoved all her son's toys into a sort of arrested landslide in the corner of his room. The most important exchange in the film will take place on land and under sea, a visual reinforcement of the liminal moral. The worlds merge, but they always mirrored.
For the record, Fujimoto is just about the only character from media I have ever considered cosplaying. It is probably never going to happen—I wouldn't mind owning a striped boating blazer and the gold ear-bobs wouldn't be too hard to get hold of, but my experiences with makeup have traditionally ended in allergies and here it seems non-negotiable.
gaudior once suggested, and I see no reason to disagree, that Fujimoto styles himself after his wife because she is a goddess and he is her devotee; in that case his unruly, somewhat tendrilly red hair may be as close as even an ex-human can manage to her endless coral-colored billows. I enjoy the way it bristles out suddenly, catlike, when he's startled or especially stressed, which in all honesty doesn't take much. We only see them together in one scene, but it seems characteristic of their relationship that while Fujimoto is bugging out over falling stars and rising tides, Granmamare simply folds one translucent hand around him, gently containing her husband as he blinks apprehensively: "Be calm, my dear." I have no doubt that his transition from humanity was as complicated as he intimates, but for his daughter it's as simple and perilous as being loved for who she is. "I love Ponyo as a fish, half-fish, and fully human. I love her in all her forms." Under the pastel scroll of the end credits, he's glimpsed with his submarine topside and shining like a lighthouse among storm-darkened waves; perhaps he is finding a less apocalyptic way to ease the interactions of humans with the sea. His daughters are growing up and so must he.I saw this film originally in Japanese with subtitles; with my niece we watched the English dub. I don't have much to say about it except that it seems to have been cast with an ear to matching voice types and at no point did I feel it went wildly off script. Noah Cyrus and Frankie Jonas are not cloying as Ponyo and Sosuke; I feel the goddess-casting of Cate Blanchett might have been a little too on the nose, but I like Tina Fey as Lisa, kind of immature and yet loving and courageous; Liam Neeson made a surprisingly effective Fujimoto, although I missed the original actor's ability to skid from forbidding misanthropy to dignity-shredding wail at the drop of an amphora. My mother loved that the old ladies at the senior center were voiced by Cloris Leachman, Betty White, and Lily Tomlin. Technically Matt Damon was in this movie, but mostly he was away at sea. When she's older, my niece can form her own opinions about sub vs. dub; for now it just makes me happy that she responded so strongly to the movie. I would have loved it when I was her age. Instead I imprinted on Splash (1984) and spent years of baths willing my skin to crinkle into salt-crisped scales, a fin to unfurl where my feet had been, exactly the opposite trajectory of Ponyo. I feel that when her father named her Brunhilde, he should really have expected at least a little chaos. This sea-change brought to you by my caring backers at Patreon.
