Ponyo (Three-and-a-Half Stars)
by Mike Wilmington

Hayao Miyazaki‘s devotion to old-fashioned animation, in an age of computerized cartoon virtuosity of all sorts, gives his movies a charmingly personal, beguilingly hand-crafted feel — never more so than in his latest picture, Ponyo.

Another international collaboration between Miyazaki and one of the masters of the new computer animation style, John Lasseter of Pixar (who acts here as the English language co-director), it’s  a kiddie-hip wondrous fairytale about the love affair between a five year old boy named Sosuke and a magical goldfish-turned-little girl named Ponyo. Their romance — beginning when Sosuke fishes the little gold belle from the sea and she smittenly turns human for him — literally knocks the world‘s socks off and pulls the moon almost down to the ocean tides.

The inspiration, quite obviously, is Hans Christian Andersen‘s masterpiece  The Little Mermaid, which, in its original version (not the delightful but more emotionally shallow Disney feature cartoon), was one of the saddest fairytales ever told. But Disney’s version wasn’t a tearjerker and neither is Miyazaki’s. It‘s a little crayon-colored bliss-out of a kiddie movie, with an ecological subtext.

Of course, the world and its oceans do seem threatened for a while, and one wonders for a while, how powerful and friendly Ponyo’s ocean king dad Fujimoto really is. But, once Ponyo starts chowing down with Sosuke and his family, one feels that, in this fairytale, happily ever after wont be too much of a stretch.

It’s a truly lovable film, with an immaculately childlike perspective. The drawings and animation — simpler and more primitive and Pokemon-looking than any other recent Miyazaki film (like Spirited Away or Howl‘s Moving Castle — almost seem to spring alive from coloring books, and the story  twists and turns to jump right out of your own private inner child right into your adult soul.

Ponyo and Sosuke are voiced by a couple of rocklings, Noah Cyrus (Miley‘s sister) and Frankie Jonas (of the Jonas clan), and the rest of the cast includes Tina Fey and Matt Damon as Sosuke’s parents, Liam Neeson as Fujimoto, a kind of Japanese Jupiter, Cate Blanchett as her mother, the ocean queen, and Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin and Betty White as three great old biddies at a nearby old folks‘ home, the Goldenish Girls of this movie.

Lasseter and company have done well by Ponyo, and I think the decision to redub Miyazaki for American audiences makes a lot of sense — especially considering that the core audience, especially for this movie, is children. Let’s hope that a lot of them haven’t gotten so technically sophisticated and demanding, they can’t take a shine to this sweet little goldfish and her faithful boy pal.