A daughter of some sort of....fish king and goddess of the sea, Ponyo is a little goldfish who while watching her dad do...something...she decides to go up to look at the surface. While in the regions of the continental shelf, Ponyo gets initially trapped by a fishing trawler net and then more seriously, in a jar. Unable to swim, she washes up on a beach and nearly dies until Sosuke, a 5 year old boy, finds and saves her. He decides he keep her - a feeling mutually shared by Ponyo. He takes her to kindergarten and also shows her to some women at an old folks home where his mother works. In the process of hiding Ponyo from his classmates, Ponyo's father sends a giant wave that sweeps her back to sea and Sosuke is devastated. However, Ponyo has decided she wants to be human and will do anything to get back to him.
The cel animation is amazing - the underwater scenes are particularly incredible when you realise that all the thousands of sea creatures and light effects were hand drawn! No CGI manipulation going on here! The story is quite a sweet albeit incredibly simple - another amor vincit omnia (love conquers all) with cute kids who simply gel together and can't be kept apart. In fact most of the characters are nice people although there is the odd cranky old woman and bratty kid. And it all comes together with the lesson that we should all learn and accept.
So why have I had such a difficult time writing this? Well part of me thinks I should really love this film. It's a Miyazaki film and he has done some stuff that I love (Totoro, Spirited Away) and Ponyo has got all the elements of a Studio Ghibli movie - gorgeous looking, childhood heroes, it's also part riff on environmentalism. But on the other hand, he's done stuff that I hated, specifically Howl's Moving Castle - the story felt somewhat superficial, probably due to the little character development (okay, difficult to do when your lead characters are only 5), and an extremely abrupt ending. In fact, I thought the thing that interested me the most was going to be the conclusion for the film - Ponyo's dad says he used to be human and turned his back on the world...but it was never addressed again!
Not bad enough that I would tell people not to watch it, but I had difficulty maintaining my attention for the scant 101 minutes of its running time. In fact, I did at times find myself pausing the movie to see what else was going on in my house. This is not a good thing. However too many people have said they loved it so maybe I'm missing some integral element to make me rave about it more.
5-6/10
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