Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea:

A Movie Review

by John David Ebert

Nobody makes animated movies like Miyazaki. Disney is incapable of making a good film and nowadays relies for its credibility on distributing Pixar and Studio Ghibli movies as though to suggest that it had something to do with the wonderful creativity of those two studios, but in fact, Disney movies are so saccharine sweet and badly scripted that they are generally nauseating even to eight-year-old children. Disney, nowadays, it is safe to say, just can’t get it right because they don’t understand that filmmaking is not about recycling cliches but about good writing and original ideas.

And that’s what works about Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea: its originality. I took my five year old son to see this film and we were in an auditorium full of parents with children. I would like to point out that this is the first time I’ve ever been in such a scenario when, for the entire duration of the movie, I didn’t hear a single sound from any of the children. No crying, no squirming, no impatience. Just dead silence. The kids were riveted.

Disney has a few things to learn from Miyazaki. And one of those things is how to write a story that is simultaneously watchable for both parents and children, as Pixar’s movies are so often touted to be, and which, with few exceptions, really aren’t. Pixar movies are made mainly for children with a few adult gags thrown in on top of sickening kitsch and puerile writing. Miyazaki’s films are made with the same sensibility as the early work of Steven Spielberg, and are generally watchable for everybody.

Ponyo is Miyazaki’s version of the Flood Myth: a boy named Soskei discovers a strange half-human, half-fish hybrid washed ashore near his house on a cliff by the sea and decides to take care of it. He names it Ponyo and carries it around in a water pail. The creature likes the ham that Soskei feeds it, and it also tastes a bit of Soskei’s blood from a cut. From thereafter, Ponyo develops a deep, ardent desire to become a human being. Her father is the king of an underwater city; he once used to be human but has now developed a hatred for all things human, since human beings have polluted the sea.

When he manages to take his daughter Ponyo back from the humans, he discovers that she no longer wishes to live with him in his undersea kingdom. She wishes for arms and feet and grows them, spontaneously. Then she manages to let the floodwaters loose and the fish spirits follow her to land where they submerge civilization with a gigantic flood while she manages to find her way back to her beloved playmate Soskei.

The flood that washes over the earth, submerging bridges and roads and entire cities, manages to regress the earth back to the forgotten geological era of the Devonian age when the moon was much closer to the earth and looms in the sky like a giant: the floodwaters teem with huge, prehistoric looking extinct fish and trilobites.

Ponyo and Soskei are reunited, but this time Ponyo is in the form of a little girl, and the two set forth in a tiny boat on the floodwaters to find Ponyo’s mother, who had returned to the nursing center where she worked in order to help out. The remainder of the film concerns the children’s adventures.

There is not a cliched moment in this film. Everything is completely fresh and totally inventive.

It is Miyazaki’s exploration of the ancient mythological theme of the love of the spirit world for time: “Eternity is in love with the forms of Time,” as Blake once put it. Simultaneously, the film manages to rather subtly recapitulate the myth of our evolution from sea creatures who crawled upon land one fine day, apparently simply because they desired to live there and so developed the organs necessary for them to survive on land.

Industrial society is washed away by the earth’s Gaian forces and a new world is prepared, one in which humans will temper their technologies and live in harmony with the spirit world.

The kami beings of Shinto myth are never far from Miyazaki’s imagination. Indeed, sometimes one has the impression that he somehow manages to speak on their behalf against the depredations which industrial society has inflicted upon the earth.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea is a masterpiece from Miyazaki and belongs somewhere in the same company with E.T. and Wall-E.

Indeed, I had almost completely forgotten what it’s like to watch an intelligent, well-written film. Hollywood, like everything else these days, is in crisis, and Ponyo stands out from the usual celluloid dregs like an island surrounded by an ocean of mediocrity.