The film opens with a heart stopping montage to the ocean. This is where we meet a sort of undersea wizard and his fishlike daughters. The biggest of which is Ponyo, who runs away from their undersea home before getting trapped in a glass jar. The sequence even manages to contain an environmental message on water pollution, which is something of a directorial trademark.
Ponyo floats ashore and is rescued by the infant Sosuke (voiced by Frankie Jonas), and the two to form a strong bond. Over the course of their friendship, Ponyo starts to develop more human characteristics, which came about because she tasted human blood. She even starts to develop a taste for ham, a little reference for the director’s love of pigs.
Ponyo is then taken away by her father, and warns her that by living in the human world she disrupts the earth’s ‘balance’. Ponyo defies her father and leaves, causing a massive tsunami to hit the town. This triggers an exciting, bewildering, and mind blowing series of events that can only originate from something what is sorely lacking in animated film…imagination. Only in his mind can giant waves of fish, sea Goddesses, and seascape minions exist; and it is all up on screen.
Nevertheless while the movie contains a lot of beautiful scenes, it fails to evoke the homeliness and childlike innocence captured in Totoro. This might be due to the sheer scope of the film. Totoro was in essence, a story about childhood and nature. The sheer number of themes Ponyo tried to address, however, diluted its essence.
But if you can block your head out the fact that Miyazaki has created so many other better movies, this one fares sufficiently well on its own. Especially when you consider the mediocre material it is screening against. The thing about Miyazaki’s movies is that the most poignant moments are those that never seem to try. He focuses on the most mundane, trivial activities you can think of and breathes life into those scenes. That is what makes his movies seem special, and that could be the true essence of Miyazaki.
