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Saturday, June 19, 2010
Watching: Ponyo
Warning: Spoilers Ahead
Since Ponyo was released in American theaters last summer, I’ve been hearing good things about it. Johnathan is a Miyazaki fan, so we’d intended to see it while it was in theaters. Then suddenly it wasn’t in theaters anymore, and we hadn’t managed to see it. Somehow it has fallen off of our radar consistently for almost an entire year! We got it on blu-ray the other day from Netflix, and finally got around to watching it (rather than letting our Netflix discs sit for months on end, as I have managed to do on more than one occasion).
Ponyo is very, very beautiful. The colors are wonderful and the characters are whimsical which makes it a treat to watch, at least from a visual standpoint. The film is hand-drawn on paper rather than cels, digital rendering or even digital drawing. The texture that results creates a depth that I’m not sure could quite be replicated any other way.
To my dismay, however, I did not find the plot as engaging as the art. I felt that it was a little bit lacking in overall plot depth. Little fishy wants to get away from her father/father figure and swims out into the open ocean, then ends up right near land, where Sosuke finds and saves her. Because she tastes human blood, she is able to morph herself into a human, albeit a socially inept one (since she’s not a human – she’s a fish). There’s talk about how when a fish with a human face comes to land, there’s a tsunami, and sure enough there’s a tsunami. Sosuke’s mom Lisa is a bit reckless and kind of stupid at times when it comes to handling the weather, and ends up abandoning the two small children in the house on the hill instead of evacuating as they were warned to do, and then in the end, some magical spirit lady shows up and says that if Sosuke really loves Ponyo then she can stay on land, and if not she has to become a fish again and live in the ocean. Sosuke promises that he does and everyone promises to be very good to each other, the end.
Nothing felt like it delved very far down below the surface, and I ended up bored enough that I just looked for the artistic details instead of paying much attention to the story. It was simple enough to comprehend that it did not require even half of my attention. I’ve watched only one other Miyazaki film to date, and of the two, this one was the less weird, but also less engaging. The other was much longer, but had a more complicated storyline which kept me interested through the end of the movie. It was much darker, in art and in plot, but I think that was fitting for the story. Ponyo was light in color for the most part, but also fairly light in plot, with the majorest of events being the conflict of whether Ponyo will be able to live with Sosuke on land or whether she will have to return to the sea with the other “ponyos” and her parents.
While I view animation as a medium, not a genre (and certainly not a children’s genre), I felt that Ponyo was a movie aimed at children. It didn’t seem to have enough depth to keep me engaged, and in fact, I really liked The Princess and The Frog better than I liked Ponyo, which was totally unexpected. Ponyo was certainly a beautiful film, but I found it lacking in story development. I really wanted to like it, and maybe I would have if I had been watching with younger kids, who would likely have been enraptured by Sosuke’s adventures. I was really just disappointed by it, maybe because my expectations were so high. As Johnathan likes to put it, it was anticipointment.
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