Hayao Miyazaki is the top Japanese animator, the creator of brilliantly colored fantasies like Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Castle in the Sky. Ponyo is his latest film to come, redubbed with English-speaking actors and distributed by Disney, whose Pixar chief John Lasseter is one of Mihazaki’s biggest fans. Like his earlier film, Ponyo is a fairy story at heart, this time set in a modern Japanese seaside community. And like his other films, it is something that takes getting used to. Miyasaki’s tales have their own rules, sometimes opaque to Western eyes and lacking the clear story logic and life lessons so prominent in homegrown Disney films. I guess dreamlike is the best description for them.
Ponyo is inspired by the original Hans Christian Anderson story, The Little Mermaid, but only loosely. Ponyo is first seen as a red and white gold fish but with a somewhat simplified human face. When she’s rescued by a five-year old boy, Sosuke, her love for him allows her to magically grow into a little human girl. But the magic she has unleashed in doing so threatens to upset the balance of nature and her wizard father and magical sea-mother realize that something must be resolved before harmony is restored. It’s a pretty thin plot, but enough to spark a spectacular series of scenes that are so imaginative that they’re nearly indescribable. One I’ll remember is when Ponyo and Sosuke are riding a small toy boat through the flooded forest with once high branches now just arching over them as they glide through the shaded flood zone, patches of sunlight dappling their way. The film’s backgrounds appear drawn with vivid chalk and in a CGI age, to see the hundreds of individually-drawn fish of many types swimming by is a reminder of the power of two-dimensional animation now so rare in feature films. No one is doing this better than Hayao Miyazaki.
Hey Professor Wainer! I saw Ponyo in theaters out here in LA with a full audience of mostly (Asian) children… and loved it! I didn’t discover the work of Hayao Miyazaki until my junior year at PBA, and never really fully embraced him until moving to the west coast where, no doubt due to a high Asian population, his work is more widely available and discussed. I’ve since grown to appreciate his full body of work, and was excited to have the chance to see Miyazaki live on stage at the Academy just a few weeks ago when he visited LA to sit down for an interview with John Lasseter of Pixar. Billed as the “greatest living animator” and “Japan’s answer to Disney”, I awaited the evening with Miyazaki with anticipation, only to be unable to attend by a cruel twist of fate: I was employed for a 3 week period that included the date of the Miyazaki symposium and my job kept me at the office until nearly 9pm every night, making attending the event impossible. I was able to drive by the Academy later that evening after the event had already transpired and pick up a program at least that included some essays by film critics and historians about the contributions of Hayao’s work and his studio Ghibli to the film community at large. In short, as I sat and watched Ponyo a week later in theaters (my first Miyazaki on the big screen), I was once again transported back to the child-like state of wonder and reminded of the old classically drawn Disney films of my elementary years. Everything about Ponyo – the art, the bright primary colors, the music, the innocence… well, lets just say I loved it all and (while only 24 years old!) felt a sad sense of nostalgia that some of this innocence has been lost today in the world of Hannah Montana, Coraline, and, dare I say it, even some of Pixars more mature storylines. Don’t get me wrong, I love a complex piece of animation, and even Miyazaki has done much heavier work himself, such as Princess Mononoke with it’s PG-13 subject matter, but I was deeply appreciative of Ponyo’s story and it’s effects on the audience. I’m glad we still have artists like Miyazaki laboring the old fashioned way, bringing us back full circle to a simpler time after a heavy summer of Up and Coraline. Those two were both brilliant technical and thematic achievements (Up was one of my favorite films of the year so far), but frankly neither touched me on the same nostalgic level the way the innocence of Ponyo did…
Comment by Benjamin Friday — September 9, 2009 @ 9:03 am |
Thanks for your comments, Ben. It was our first theatrical Miyazaki too. I read in World magazine that he came out of retirement to make this and thus it could be his last film. Heard anything along those lines?
Comment by Alex — September 9, 2009 @ 11:51 am |
I had heard he was going to retire after making Howls Moving Castle as well, but then when I heard he was making Ponyo I just naturally assumed he was deciding to press on. One of my housemates out here in LA is a Korean animator named Byung and he loves Miyazaki’s work. He told me Miyazaki had always intended to hand the reigns of Studio Ghibli over to a man named Yoshifumi Kondo and then retire. Trouble was, Kondo died of a sudden aneurysm in 1998, having only directed one Studio Ghibli film, Whisper of the Heart in 1995. That was the year after Miyazaki had made Princess Mononoke (1997)… he went into depression following Kondo’s death and took a few years off. After that, Miyazaki went on to make Spirited Away (2001), Howl’s Moving Castle (2004), and Ponyo (2008)… after the release of each film, he has claimed it would be his last, yet he continues to return to work and make more films every time. We’ll see how long this new retirement lasts… I would like to see him stay in production for the rest of his life, but I’m biased towards his films now that I’ve seen more and they’ve grown on me tremendously.
If you like his films, try watching a film by Isao Takahata sometime… he co-founded Studio Ghibli with Miyazaki back in 1985, and yet his films are decidedly vacant of the fantasy themes that populate Miyazaki’s work, tending to focus much more on realism. His greatest film is probably Grave of the Fireflies, made in 1988. It’s a very harsh look at war through the eyes of innocent children in Japan, and one of the most emotionally mature animated films I’ve ever seen. Takahata has been dealing with more mature themes like death long before Pixar made Up… I’ve heard many of my friends say the first time they cried in an animated film was in Grave of the Fireflies…
Comment by Benjamin Friday — September 13, 2009 @ 6:54 am |