Movie Review: Ponyo on the Cliff

It is often said that older people start to return to a more youthful, childlike state and so it is for 67-year-old master animator, Hayao Miyazaki with his latest film, Ponyo on the Cliff. After making numerous movies that have presented a more mature depth in presenting childhood as in My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, this time he immerses himself completely into the mind of a five-year-old. It assumes no more life experience than a child at that age and captures only the simple wonder of one who is just beginning to realize what it means to grow up into the human world.

The plot is borrowed somewhat from The Little Mermaid and is even more stripped down and elemental than that film. Like Ariel, the title character, Ponyo (Yuria Nara) is a red goldfish who wants to become a human although she does not have any trace of human traits in the beginning. Also, she and the boy she meets, Sosuke (Hiroki Doi), are only five, which means that this is not a teenage love story but about befriending someone unconditionally as a child before all the worldly complications set in.

The movie has a wondrous underwater opening that is simultaneously a trademark and a departure for a Miyazaki film. The masterful sense of perspective, texture, and movement are all present but the water color and pastel animation here goes for more of a simple children’s drawing palette than a photorealistic one with shadow lighting (except for the villainous or more mysterious characters who are drawn with darker shadows). It is here we see the little goldfish escape in a bubble away to the surface from her sibling schools of fish led by her father, Fujimoto (Joji Tokoro). Once the goldfish escapes, however, she gets her head stuck in a glass jar and washes on shore. There Sosuke finds her and gets her out of the jar by breaking it. He immediately bonds with the goldfish that he names Ponyo perhaps because she is the first one he has directly rescued from harm.

Article Author: moviejohn

Joo-Wang John Lee is a computer programmer at Binghamton University by day and a movie critic by hobby. Upon insistent suggestion from people around him, he finally decided to start critiquing movies in writing instead of just verbal form among his friends. …

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