OH YEAH
Ponyo (2008, Hayao Miyazaki)
Ol' Hayao just can't leave it alone. Seemingly every one of his films this decade has been pronounced as his "last film", and yet, every few years, another one comes down the pipe, and we're all better for it.
Four years after his last international feature, Howl's Moving Castle, the 67-year-old Miyazaki came out of pseudo-retirement again (and even then, after making many shorts for his native Japan) to put forth Ponyo on the Cliff. A year later, Disney dropped the cliff, switched the voices, and Ponyo hit American shores.
Ponyo tells the story of a young boy named Sosuke (voiced in the American version, in an almost offensively corporate Disney casting move, by Frankie Jonas, brother of the Brothers), who lives in a house on a cliff with his harried mother (Tina Fey), a nurse at a retirement home (with old folks voiced by Cloris Leachman, Lily Tomlin and Betty White), while his father (Matt Damon) is out to sea for long stretches. One day, while playing in the ocean, Sosuke comes across a friendly little fish with a human face, and names it Ponyo (voiced, again with the Disney synergy, by Miley's weirdly-named sister, Noah Cyrus). This fish is being pursued by her father, a water-bound human named Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), but once Ponyo gets into trouble and begins to turn into a human girl, the moon gets progressively closer and closer to Earth, and universe seems to be shifting a little bit out of balance...
Judged completely on narrative content, Ponyo has a lot of holes. Very little is explained, unusual things merely "are", and the contrivances fly high and fast, covered up by claims of "magic" and "spirits", etc. If Miyazaki was a stringently formal director, this would be a big issue. Thankfully, he is much more concerned with mood, feeling and experience. Miyazaki basically has a monopoly on cinematic childhood, he has cornered the market on discovery, and no one brings forth a sense of fresh childhood wonder better than the king of Studio Ghibli. In this vein, Ponyo is another grand success. Miyazaki posits that children can be more receptive to supernatural occurrences because they don't realize it's not supposed to happen that way. When Ponyo glides across the tops of waves, or creates electricity, or turns a toy into a lifesize working facsimile, Sosuke takes it all in stride because, well, he's five. Why shouldn't kids be able to do that?
In the voice acting department, Disney's dubs are usually solid, and this was no different. The children, Jonas and Cyrus, for all their cheap nepotism, actually do a really good job. Cyrus especially manages to be loud and excitable without being obnoxious. The adults are a bit more of a motley crew. Matt Damon is underused, and Sosuke's father seems to be more of a set-up for other things to happen rather than a fully-formed character. Liam Neeson is a bit stiff in his line readings, but the film, like Princess Mononoke, cleverly keeps the audience on the fence about his character's intentions. Miyazaki rarely paints characters in black-and-white, and the director's history makes this ambivalence even greater, since most of his characters are shades of gray: some of his villains are truly bad, and some of his films don't even HAVE antagonists (looking at you, Totoro), so it's really undecided to what depths the film is journeying. For Sosuke's mother (named Lisa, oddly enough), Tina Fey imbues her with a loving realism that carries you through some of her more...questionable decisions (she might be the most reckless driver I've seen in film in some time).
For once, the animation is not the lead story here, but that doesn't mean it's any less beautiful then before. It seems to approximate a children's book style, the kind you might see from a reenactment on Reading Rainbow, and it works marvelously, especially rendered for Sosuke's home, which has yards of grass in every direction that never move, but never feel anything but perfect for the ambiance of the tale. I'm always in awe when an animated film can make water look good, and, this being a film that is almost wholly set in or around water, it's really breathtaking to see it brought to life so flawlessly, to the point that you almost never notice its presence, which means it's as good as can be.
The qualms I had with the film were completely and comparitively minor. As stated, I had issue with some of the line readings, mostly Neeson, who occasionally sounded like he was reading from a script; also, his character takes a slightly awkward environmentalist stance that seemed shoehorned in and then forgotten about. Now and then, Sosuke had some dialogue that put him in the "artificially smart little movie kid" folder. One small scene that stuck out to me as feeling artificial was the discussion between the two five-year-olds about long-named ancient fish species, as well as some of Sosuke's platitudes to help his mother feel better, which went past Being There naivete to just feel scripted.
But that paragraph really should be in a smaller font in the rest, because on the whole, I'm really only relating them to you in the issue of fairness. Ponyo is a lovely and heartwarmingly simple film, the kind that only Miyazaki really seems to make, and make miracles with. I haven't heard anything on whether he claims THIS to once again be his last film, but whether he pushes for the next film, or he starts Favre-ing on us, his genius (as well as his flakiness) makes me hope that we shall be graced with another masterpiece by the time the world ends in 2012. Perhaps he can fix that too, maybe take a test of faith, and all will be right in the universe.
[Grade: 8.5/10 (B+) / #8 (of 119) of 2008]
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