The red-haired Ponyo bonds with her savior — or abductor — Sosuke, in the film by anime master Hayao Miyazaki
An exhibition of the most rapturous watercolors is currently on display at U.S. movie theaters. Ponyo, the latest film from anime master Hayao Miyazaki — Academy Award winner for his 2001 film, Spirited Away — begins deep in the sea near a Japanese coastal village, and the underwater vision is both subtle and spectacular. Instead of relying on the usual cartoon bubbles and wisecracking fish, Miyazaki waves a wand and establishes his location with a pastel palette, the gentle undulating of flora and anemones, and Joe Hisaishi's haunting score. You're treated, aurally and visually, to a subterranean symphony.
Animated feature is the official name these days, but the old tag cartoon suits the sort of CGI movie — your Shrek, your Ice Age — that goes for big laughs extracted from outlandish situations. Nothing wrong with that; cartoon comedy is an honorable, entertaining and often artful confection and has been since the days of Mickey Mouse, Betty Boop and the sublime Daffy Duck. But animation can go deeper, have higher stakes. You see that impulse in parts of nearly every Pixar picture: the first sections of WALL-E and Up have an ambition, a gravity that stretches the format close to that nexus of graceful motion and deep emotion where just about every Miyazaki movie serenely resides.
"He celebrates the quiet moments," says Miyazaki's No. 1 American fan, Pixar creative boss John Lasseter. "It's so rare — especially in Hollywood, where everything is bigger, louder, faster and more of it — to be brave enough to let it just quiet down." That's Miyazaki. Rather than being stocked with high-energy slapstick, his films proceed at a dream walker's pace. They're not dialogue-heavy; they're image-buoyant.
Fish out of Water
In his native Japan, Miyazaki, 68, is perhaps the most respected director working in any film form. Still making movies in 2-D, hand-drawn animation, he creates a frame-by-frame storyboard — 180,000 drawings for Ponyo — that his crew of animators brings to life with minimal help from computers. He is also one of his country's biggest star names. His 1997 Princess Mononoke was Japan's all-time box-office winner until it was overtaken by Titanic; then in 2001, Spirited Away topped Titanic, and it remains the country's top grosser. Ponyo took in $164.6 million in Japan. Now, with an English-language version supervised by Lasseter and released by Disney, it could become Miyazaki's first U.S. hit.
The story is a hybrid: a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's fable The Little Mermaid crossed with souvenirs from Miyazaki's youth. "We used to have tin toys that would float in the bath," he says, "and I thought it might be good to revitalize some old-fashioned toys like that. So I started thinking of a goldfish." The young fish, named Brunhild, is swimming with her sisters in Miyazaki's sea when she escapes this seeming paradise, floating up to the surface and getting her snout stuck in a jar. A 5-year-old boy on the shore yanks her out. He is Sosuke (voiced by Frankie Jonas, the youngest of the Jonas brood, in the U.S. version), and he decides to call his new pet Ponyo.