Over the last ten years, Hayao Miyazaki has become one of my favorite storytellers. His movies like My Neighbor Totoro, Spirited Away and Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind create new, magical worlds that are born from a rich and quite lovely imagination. I think one of the beauties of Miyazaki’s storytelling is that there are no true villains or bad guys in his tales. That would be too simplistic and easy for him. Characters who on the surface seem like villains become another point of view for the stories; an alternate worldview to Miyazaki’s main characters. Often there’s no right or wrongs in Miyazaki stories but only choices that need to be made.
In his latest movie Ponyo, Miyazaki continues to practice his storytelling magic with the story of Sosuke, the 5 year old boy who falls in love with a magical creature from the sea who he names “Ponyo.” Combining The Little Mermaid and Pinocchio (Ponyo wants to be a real girl,) Miyazaki creates a fairy tale that combines his fascination between the spiritual and the environmental without ever beating his audience over the head about issues or morals. Those are sneakily tucked into the story without ever becoming the whole story.
Visually, Ponyo is a simpler and more stylized movie than his previous films. Most of the backgrounds are created to look like colored pencil drawings, depicting the sea-side town that Sosuke and his mother live in. Unlike Miyazaki’s last couple of films, the action takes place mostly in the “real” world but his use of different techniques to portray the world make it no less magical or adventurous than anything out of Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle. When Miyazaki focuses on Ponyo, her father Fujimoto and their undersea home, Miyazaki gets to show off his skills at creating fantastical worlds. All of the life and colors under the sea have Miyazaki’s DNA built into them. His depictions of schools of jellyfish are wonderful and magical, the spiritual relatives of the forest spirits from Princess Mononoke.
Miyazaki’s story about youthful and true love is far less dark or dangerous than his last couple of films have been. He’s taken a step back towards the storytelling like My Neighbor Totoro where he’s trying to recreate a child’s world, showing us how to engage the world with child-like eyes again. Sosuke’s world is of bright colors, artful landscapes and stylized fish. It is reality but one that few adults can see unaided. Luckily Miyazaki can still see the world that way– a world of wonder and of purity, childlike but not childish. In Ponyo, Miyazaki shows us that beauty and magic still exists; all we have to do is know how to look for it.
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Tags: Hayao Miyazaki, Ponyo