The old man
and the sea

Ponyo isn’t the best work by anime master
Hayao Miyazaki, but it may be his most personal

A LIFE ACQUATIC: Ponyo

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

It remains to be seen whether Ponyo will in fact be the final, swan-song animated feature from Japan’s, and indeed the world’s, living master of the form, Hayao Miyazaki. He’s 68 now and rumours have rumbled for some time about his ever-imminent retirement, especially following his son Goro’s directorial debut, the dull and poorly received Tales From EarthSea, an adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin’s respected high-fantasy series.

Whether or not Miyazaki fashions a follow-up to this, his 10th animated feature for his own venerated Studio Ghibli, Ponyo does seem strikingly like an artform’s elder statesman strolling through the corridors of his own memory and reflecting back across a long and impressive career (that much of the activity takes place in a retirement home certainly adds to that sense). Ponyo is replete with sparkling little moments of self-reference that reach back as far as his pre-directorial, pre-Studio Ghibli days, and point to every one of the man’s many career highlights.

Miyazaki has kept his character designs fairly simple throughout, and many echo the minimal, iconic style of his 1970s pre-Ghibli staff work. The film’s core relationship—that of the lively tyke Sosuke and Ponyo, the magically imbued “goldfish” he discovers in a tidal pool—is reminiscent of the one in 1988’s My Neighbor Totoro, Miyazaki’s poetic work for small children, and hypnotic scenes of sea creatures, some of them bizarrely anachronistic Paleozoic creatures, brings to mind the strange mega-insect fauna of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Beginning with that 1984 film, a pronounced theme has informed Miyazaki’s films across the years, a nuanced and highly empathic type of objective environmentalism that recognizes the natural world as both a victim of and a menace to the human species. That dichotomy is personified here by Fujimoto, Ponyo’s father (her mom is the Sorceress of the Sea). He’s as close as Ponyo comes to having a villain—Miyazaki’s never been one to distinguish his characters through high-contrast morality. Fujimoto’s a sort of scientist/wizard (Miyazaki does so love to blur the distinction between the two) with spectacular and potentially catastrophic powers of oceanic magic, whose bitter rejection of “dangerous” humanity hasn’t entirely extinguished his capacity for kindness and concern.

Come to think of it, the only corner of Miyazaki’s mental attic that isn’t rummaged through here is his fascination with fantastical aircraft. Other than Fujimoto’s submarine, the vehicles here—ships, boats and a few cars—are rendered in a realistic, even mundane manner.

Many are calling Ponyo “Miyazaki’s Little Mermaid,” but neither the Danish fairy tale nor the dubious Disney flick were any real inspiration. Rather, Miyazaki used an obscure Japanese children’s book, Elta the Frog, as a starting point, going on to conjure his own distinctive tale full of perplexing quirks and childlike logic.

The vibrantly colourful and inventive Ponyo won’t be remembered as Miyazaki’s finest film. That would be Totoro, or Princess Mononoke maybe. But with its informal, handcrafted feel (not casual, mind you—there’s some amazingly complex animation here), highly idiosyncratic narrative, adherence to childlike wonder as a lifelong pursuit and of course constant self-reference, Ponyo will be regarded as Miyazaki’s most personal effort.