C2Comics Blog

I dare you to tell me how this could get cuter.

Imagine a room full of puppies.  They are wrestling, licking each other, and perhaps taking little puppy naps every once in a while.  Their tongues loll and their tails wag, and you wonder if this is it – if this is the most adorable thing you will every seen in your life.  Then imagine that while you are watching these adorable puppies, someone is droning on in the background about some boring-yet-slightly-creepy story.  Occasionally you can hear adorable yips from the puppies, but mainly while you are visually stimulated by the puppies, you are aurally assaulted by the story.  Imagine this going on for almost two hours.

This is what “Ponyo” is like.

Written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki, the visuals of ‘Ponyo’ are on par with his other films (‘Spirited Away’, ‘Princess Mononoke’) but lacks their powerful stories.  The story of ‘Ponyo’ is boring at best, creepy at worst.  When viewing the trailer I believed this movie would be about pollution and how the ‘goldfish girl’ (Ponyo) is charged with saving the world from the disasters we humans created.  This was a story I was excited to see.

The movie I actually saw was a story about love, a love so strong that….a girl is willing to destroy the Earth for it.  I’m sorry, no man is worth THAT much.

Already tired of the inevitable romantic side-plot to non-romance movies, to say I was disappointed that romance was the entire plot of ‘Ponyo’ is an understatement.

In brief, a little fish-girl (humanoid body but arms that resemble flippers and a fish-tail instead of legs) sneaks out of her undersea home to explore.  She is caught up in some dredging and ends up in a glass bottle.  A young boy , Sosuke, finds her and breaks the bottle then puts her in a bucket to take her to school.  Sosuke promises to protect the ‘goldfish’ and names her Ponyo.  About a minute later her father comes back to collect her.  Sosuke is upset but after an ice cream cone is okay with the situation.

Not so with Ponyo.  Ponyo is absolutely livid with her father and determined to see Sosuke again.  Apparently she is magically and uses her magic to turn herself into some kind of chicken-frog-human-fish animal?  She gets into a pot of her father’s magic potion?  And that makes some really huge waves and brings to moon closer to Earth?  What?  Huh?  Okay, I guess?  Ponyo leaves right after this to track down Sosuke.

Ponyo’s father is worried about her but Ponyo’s mother decides that if Ponyo and Sosuke really love each other, they should allow her to become a human and live with him.  After they decide this, they leave to let Sosuke rest in order to face the grueling test they have planned for him the next day.  Their plan is a little spoiler-y, so it is under the ‘read more’.

On the surface it sounds like a lame romance.  Scratch the surface and it far creepier.   Here is a girl who has her own life in her own world and she is completely fine with giving up everything to be with this boy she has known for, what, an hour?  In fact she even gives up her name – before Sosuke named her Ponyo she had been name Brunehilde.  But Sosuke wants to call her Ponyo so Ponyo she becomes.  In addition, Sosuke talks about his ‘responsibility’ to Ponyo frequently enough it almost reads as a PSA for teenage pregnancies – ‘boys, you got her into this mess.  The least you can do is take responsibility.’  He got a bottle off her head, that’s it.  If I were, I dunno, caught in a bear trap in the woods, I certainly wouldn’t expect the hunter who freed me to offer their hand in marriage out of responsibility.  Is that just me?  Am I bucking the norm again?  If so, I’ve grievously offended a large number of hunters….

One of the weirdest things about this ‘true love’ story is that Sosuke and Ponyo….are about five years old.  Five years old!  Ponyo needs to decide whether to leave her family to live with Sosuke at the tender age of five?  And Sosuke has to take on the responsibility for this girl who is entering his household because of him?  Even in Japan that is about thirteen years under the age of majority.  Nevermind these kids have known each other for about two days.  When I was five, love lasted a week, tops.  At least in “The Little Mermaid” Ariel and the Prince were both of the age of consent….

A strange thing in this film was the lack of disbelief from the other characters.  Everyone seems to see Ponyo as a goldfish, despite the fact she has the head of a frickin human!  When two five-year-olds are out in the middle of a flood by themselves, the passing townspeople simply say, ‘good luck!’ and send them on their way.  When Ponyo changes from human to the chicken-frog-human-fish thing, runs across flood waters, and kisses a baby, all the mother does is say ‘Thanks!’  Once again, would my freaking out at this metamorphosis and seeming miracle be out of turn?  Am I the only person who doesn’t experience this kind of thing regularly?  The lack of disbelief in the other characters is a drawback to the film as it makes me wonder why this story is special.  Since the townspeople are so used to this, obviously there must be tons of the goldfish people wandering around looking for love.  What makes this story so special?

Besides that the voice acting is bland at best.  It is almost as though someone asked all the stars to watch poorly-dubbed anime from the 1960′s and use the exact same inflection.  Lines are delivered stiffly and haltingly.  Tina Fey is especially bad as Lisa, Sosuke’s mother, though not many others stand out either.  Cate Blanchett does a fair job at Ponyo’s mother and Frankie Jonas and Noah Cyrus made Sosuke and Ponyo adorably voiced (respectively).  However, the ages of Sosuke and Ponyo were such that you expect strange speech patterns.  Were these voice actors doing a good job, or were their characters just hiding the flaws?

Another minor glitch I have with the movie is that ‘Ponyo’ is pronounced ‘Pahn-yo’, not ‘Pohn-yo’.  The name Ponyo is supposed to be representative of the sound something soft and squishy would make.  Somehow Pahnyo just doesn’t sound soft.

So in summary, adorable, visually stunning film to rent via NetFlix and watch while muted and listening to baby birds chirping.

….so the ‘grueling test’ that Sosuke was faced with?

He was asked if he loved Ponyo.  No, ‘choose between your mother and Ponyo, as she must choose between her father and you!’ or ‘Choose to save the world or marry Ponyo!’  Nope.  A simple, ‘do you love her?’

Ug.