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Disney has just re-released Hayao Miyazaki's 2008 Japanese hit Gake no ue no Ponyo, or Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. They went all out, employing an all-star cast including Cate Blanchett, Noah Cyrus, Matt Damon, Frankie Jonas, Tina Fey, Cloris Leachman, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin and Betty White. My five-year-old daughter has been begging us to see the movie, so we finally ventured out to see it last night.
Disney's Ponyo opened to wide release in 927 theatres across America on August 14th. "Wide release" apparently doesn't include our local theaters, so we had to travel a bit to view it. Our kids, ages eight and five, were first introduced to Hayao Miyazaki through his film Spirited Away. We had only heard of this anime filmmaker through a friend who is well versed in anime. Spirited Away was filled with mystical forces, stunning animation, and compelling story-telling.
Ponyo is a modern day telling of "The Little Mermaid" set in a Japanese fishing village. Ponyo is a goldfish that longs to be human to be a precocious and charming five-year-old boy. There's magic, tsunamis, transformation and salvation.
Having been saturated with computer generated animated films from Pixar and DreamWorks for the last ten years, viewing a traditionally animated film was almost quaint. The visuals were rich in details and color and the characters were immediately endearing. As a foreign film purist, I kept being distracted by the ways Disney Americanized it. There were some signs that were left in Japanese, and then some signs that were in English (potato chips, for one). Most of the character names were Japanese, but the mother's name was Lisa. I suppose that Americanizing the movie makes it more accessible to the American audience, but I would definitely want to see it in the original Japanese with subtitles. According to IMDB, the mother's name was Risa in Japanese, so I guess it wasn't too far from the original.
My family was split on their feelings for the movie. My husband doesn't like the anime style of animation with the large eyes and felt that the movie was a bit weird. Ponyo was the strangest looking goldfish he'd ever seen. My eight-year-old son didn't know what to make of it and couldn't give me an opinion other that "I don't know". I think the visuals were overwhelming and the cultural differences felt strange to him, although we came home to "magical" ramen noodles. My daughter's first reaction was, "The movie was horrible! Because I dropped my food!" Indeed, she dropped not one, but two bags of pretzels and chips all over the floor and proceeded to melt down during the movie. But when I tucked her in to bed and asked her again, she said that she really liked the movie. Her favorite character was Ponyo, of course.
I felt the movie was beautiful and enchanting. My favorite character was the spirited, fast-driving mother, voice-acted by Tina Fey. The voice acting by eight-year-old child actors, Noah Cyrus (younger sister of Miley) and Frankie Jonas (younger brother of the Jonas brothers), were spot on. The film is definitely geared towards younger audiences, but despite the hackneyed plot, it was still endearing.
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Are you planning to see Ponyo? If you have a child under 10 years old, it should certainly be a magical experience for them.
Contributing editor Angela blogs about entertaining her family at mommy bytes.
