Ponyo

Pixar and Stu­dio Ghi­b­li are both pow­er­hous­es of ​‘crit­ic-proof’ ani­mat­ed fea­tures, and both have a com­pli­cat­ed rela­tion­ship with Dis­ney. Apart from Pixar’s predilec­tion for all-CG pro­duc­tions, and Ghibli’s pref­er­ence for hand-drawn cels, per­haps the great­est dif­fer­ence between them rests in sen­si­bil­i­ty, con­ve­nient­ly sum­marised by one word: ​‘wow’.

This is the word that opens Pixar’s ocean­ic adven­ture Find­ing Nemo, uttered by neu­rot­ic pro­tag­o­nist Mar­lin as a hyper­vivid vista splash­es across the screen. Ghibli’s lat­est, Ponyo, sim­i­lar­ly opens with a mul­ti-hued spec­ta­cle of under­wa­ter life, but writer-direc­tor-genius Hayao Miyaza­ki choos­es to let his view­ers say ​‘wow’ for them­selves – and they will.

For Miyaza­ki, a pic­ture tells a thou­sand words, and here there are 24 pic­tures per sec­ond, some resem­bling a child’s inchoate draw­ings ren­dered in pas­tel pens, oth­ers impos­si­bly detailed, but all exquis­ite­ly beau­ti­ful and bizarre. Togeth­er they tell a sto­ry as desul­to­ry, mag­i­cal and pro­tean as the gods and wiz­ards of a blight­ed sea.

With its aquat­ic pro­tag­o­nist who defies her father to join her earth­bound beloved, in out­line Ponyo is not too many leagues away from Hans Chris­t­ian Andersen’s (or Disney’s) The Lit­tle Mer­maid, but Miyaza­ki has made this sto­ry unmis­tak­ably his own. An idio­syn­crat­ic focus on women in a seniors’ home recalls the aged hero­ine (and anti-hero­ine) from Miyazaki’s pre­vi­ous film Howl’s Mov­ing Cas­tle, while the morose, epicene fig­ure cut by Ponyo’s alchemist father, Fuji­mo­to (voiced by Liam Nee­son), sug­gests the mer­cu­r­ial Howl himself.

The bol­shy ebul­lience of Ponyo, whether in gold­fish or human form (or some­where in between), evokes the sim­i­lar­ly tod­dler-aged Mei from My Neigh­bour Totoro, where­as the eco­log­i­cal con­cerns swim­ming below the sur­face of Ponyo are shared by vir­tu­al­ly all of Miyazaki’s oeu­vre – as is the imag­i­na­tive exu­ber­ance and visu­al bril­liance of the ideas on offer.

The love between Ponyo (Noah Cyrus) and five-year-old Sosuke (Frankie Jonas) may rep­re­sent an unnat­ur­al merg­ing of sea and land, but all its most fan­tas­tic ele­ments are pre­sent­ed so mat­ter-of-fact­ly, and in such domes­ti­cat­ed detail, that you too will imag­ine you are wit­ness­ing events through a young child’s unques­tion­ing eyes – which makes the film’s sim­ple, even naïve, mes­sage that much eas­i­er to swal­low with­out drown­ing in sentiment.

For while here, as in Richard Kelly’s The Box, the fate of the world rests in the moral choice of two indi­vid­u­als, Miyaza­ki brings us a far more opti­mistic vision of nature, human or oth­er­wise. If, he sug­gests, we all loved sea-life in the same uncon­di­tion­al way that we love the mem­bers of our own fam­i­ly, many of the world’s envi­ron­men­tal prob­lems could imme­di­ate­ly be resolved – and so Miyaza­ki mar­ries that sta­ple theme of children’s cin­e­ma, fam­i­ly val­ues, to much broad­er issues of respect and responsibility.

At its heart, Ponyo is a film about a glob­al cat­a­stro­phe no less destruc­tive than the shift­ing plates and ris­ing waters of 2012. But the apoc­a­lypse has sel­dom seemed so light, joy­ous or tender.