A magical goldfish named Ponyo yearns to become human to be with Souske, but their friendship leads to unintended consequences on both land and sea.
We were looking for a movie to try from Studio Ghibli, the Japanese animation giant and possible rival to Walt Disney. That was the blurb for Ponyo (2008).
“It sounds like a Mad Lib,” the older said.
“Yeah, you’re right,” I said and started to re-read it.
“A magical blank named blank yearns to become blank to be with blank.”
The older laughed and took it from there.
“But their blank leads to unintended blank on both blank and blank.”
It looked a little newer than the other title we were considering, Kiki’s Delivery Service (1989). We ran it by his brother.
“It sounds childish,” the younger said. “I’m not a child, dad.”
I was new to Studio Ghibli movies. My Neighbor Totoro (1988) had been sitting in my queue for years, next to other stuff that kept getting pushed down, like Battleship Potemkin (1925) and Umberto D (1952). I had finally watched it, with the kids, after my wonderful partner gifted us some DVDs that she had watched with her kids, Totoro among them. We had liked it, collectively experiencing the strangeness and wonder of Ghibli that I’m sure all fans recall from their first encounters. There’s nothing quite like these movies, with their surreal, animated blend of family drama and nature-inspired whimsy, and almost nothing in our experience as American movie- watchers prepares us for them.
“I must say that I hate Disney’s works. The barrier to both the entry and exit of Disney films is too low and too wide. To me, they show nothing but contempt for the audience.” – Hayao Miyazaki, founder of Studio Ghibli.
Totoro had come and gone. I went back to my own well for picks, and the kids were in no hurry to burn one of theirs on another Ghibli. Then a piece in a recent New York Times caught my attention, the one that contained the above (older) quote. A Ghibli-inspired theme park had opened in Japan, and what was described in the article put the vast gulf between Japanese and American sensibilities, in film, life, and everything in between, into stark relief. The theme park wasn’t at all what Americans might imagine it to be. It was the anti-Disney.
Located on the outskirts of Nagoya, an industrial city seldom visited even by Japanese people, Ghibli Park is housed entirely within another park, a commemorative park from a 2005 expo that looks exactly like what such a description implies: sports facilities, nondescript buildings, and acres of manicured green park. The park does not scream out to be seen. According to its website, the park was built “in close consultation with the surrounding forest.” The exhibits are not rides, but rather low-key installations, connected by miles of wooded paths. One, pictured with the article, is a Totoro climbing structure that looked like no more than a handful of kids could play on it at once. There’s no signage, no concessions, not even a bench. Everything is tucked away, hidden, special and secret-like, to be encountered individually, and with nature.
The whole thing seems designed almost as if they do not want people to visit there. The barrier for entry was sufficiently high and wide. This man’s hatred for Disney was starting to make more sense.
Ponyo begins with the birth of the aforementioned magic goldfish, under the sea, near the lair of a kind of mad scientist, with long, unruly white hair and striped pants, whom we learn is Ponyo’s father, voiced in the American version of the film by Liam Neeson.
“Who dresses like that? He looks like a demented rockstar,” the younger said. Then he qualified that. “Actually all rock stars are demented. He looks like an extra demented rockstar.”
The beginning is strange. Colors swirl in shades reminiscent of 1960s Fender guitars. The man is acting crazy. The fish seem to be crying.
“Do fish cry?”
“He’s crazy!”
The room filled with confusion, as the assembled family, including my sister and my partner, along with the kids, wrestled with the first ten minutes.
“Why do they all look like Speed Racer?” my sister asked. “You’ve seen this before? I’ve never even heard of this.”
It felt strange to be placed in a position to have to defend Disney, but Miyazaki seemed to be saying that Disney is for stupid people because the movies are too accessible, too easy to get into, to follow, to understand and enjoy. And the endings suck because they’re too neat. And anyone who would present such movies to an audience must hate that audience or think they’re stupid.
On some level I agreed, but on another level I bristled. Who was this guy, with his weirdo, trippy art films, with their irritating theme songs that just repeated the title over and over, to be cracking on a beloved cultural institution that has given the world hundreds of movies, musicals, TV shows, and cartoons over nearly a century? And songs. Especially the songs.
I had never given Disney much thought. I watched the old, classic films growing up and enjoyed them, especially Peter Pan (1953). But that was a long time ago. The most recent ones I remember going to the theater to see were The Black Hole (1979) and The Fox and the Hound (1981). Then I discovered punk rock and girls. For the next thirty years, I could not have cared less about Disney movies. I didn’t see a single one, barely knew they even existed. The Little Mermaid (1989), Aladdin (1992), The Lion King (1994), Pocahontas (1995)? Nope, nope, nope, and nope.
When the older was about three years old, Disney came back into my life. It was two Disney movies that had the biggest impact of any movies on my kids’ young lives: Frozen (2013) and Moana (2016). It would be tough to overstate the effect of those movies on my kids. They were all-consuming, and not for a short time, but for years. And more so than even the movies, which we watched many times, what stuck hard with the kids, especially the older, were the songs. The original songs composed and performed for both movies were outstanding. They were more than afterthoughts with inane lyrics to run over the opening and closing credits. Way more.
The plot of Ponyo unfolds as the friendship develops between the two main characters. Ponyo starts out looking sort of like a fish, but as she yearns to become more human, she sprouts an odd pair of chicken legs, and begins to take the shape of a girl.
“She’s a magic fish-human chicken,” the older said.
“She looks more like a squid or a dumbo octopus,” the younger countered.
What was that? we asked.
“It’s an octopus that has webbing between its tentacles.”
The younger knew a lot about animals, especially sea creatures. He had paid close attention during episodes of the Octonauts.
Ponyo’s father goes to look for her.
“He’s acting like a psycho maniac idiot!” the younger said.
“You don’t know that,” my sister said in the father’s defense. “Maybe he’s just out of sorts.”
“Oh, he’s definitely out of sorts,” the older countered, always ready to try out a new phrase as if he’d used it for years.
Then Ponyo’s mother, a type of sea goddess, joins the search, and all of the searching stirs up the seas in dangerous ways for the human characters. Storms and floods overtake the place where the boy, Souske, and his mother live. Souske’s mother springs into action to beat the storm and reach her home. The music of the film score, which had been mostly dreamy, childlike glockenspiel, shifts to a dramatic Wagner-like mode. The waves rise and crash onto the land like monsters. Cars race. Faces strain in anguish. The Wagner-style strings peal in great crescendos.
It’s an action sequence. A fairly standard one. You don’t need to be Pauline Kael to understand it. The bar, for this scene at least, is not high.
For his fourth birthday, the older received a visit from Elsa, ice-princess-turned-queen from Frozen. Hired through Wish Upon a Star, from the depths of Metairie, she knocked on the door for a full house of young party-goers and their parents. We played it up, maybe too much. She came in knowing the older’s name, looking for him. He was mortified. I held him in my arms and he buried his face in my shoulder when she tried to speak to him. When she wasn’t trying to talk to him, though, he was mesmerized, staring wide-eyed at her, as his guests took turns posing for pictures with her. She was so beautiful! The other kids weren’t as fazed. They were asking her to turn things into ice, to demonstrate, to prove, really, her magic powers. Her powers didn’t work so far from the north pole, she told them.
“Let it Go” was one of the older’s first favorite songs. He knew the words and could carry the melody in his small, breathy voice. He would never do it for people, but I would overhear him singing it to himself. “Let it Go” was composed by the husband-and-wife team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, and was performed by Idina Menzel as part of her voice role in the film as Elsa. A simplified pop version was also recorded by Demi Lovato and released by Disney. The song became Disney’s first top-ten Billboard hit since 1995. It sold 10.9 million copies worldwide in 2014, the fifth-best-selling song of the year, worldwide. and has been recorded in 25 different languages.
Other massive-selling worldwide hits from Disney include “When You Wish upon a Star,” “A Whole New World,” and “You Can Fly.” The first was co-written by Ned Washington, the second by Alan Menken, and the third by Sammy Cahn, three Jewish Americans. Jews are by far one of the most minor ethnic and religious groups in Japan, consisting of around 1000 mostly foreign-born, non-citizens.
I ran this half-baked theory by my colleague.
“You think maybe there’s no songs in Ghibli movies because there’s no Jews in Japan?’
He wasn’t buying it, but the next day he did tell me that his wife thinks I’m hilarious.
I was asking him for recommendations on which one to try. He had watched a lot of them with his kids. I told him we had seen Totoro and had tried Princess Mononoke (1997) but that it was too violent. He had suggested Spirited Away (2001) but warned that it might be disturbing. The parents get turned into pigs.
Another colleague had suggested Pom Poko (1994). He had watched a bunch of them with his kids. It seemed like everyone had watched these movies with their kids! These were arty people, though, academics, with their “children-of-academics.” They were never going to plan a vacation to Disneyworld. They might side with Disney in the extra-stupid fight between the company and the Florida governor, but that didn’t stop them from also loathing Disney for their own reasons. (“I don’t give a fuck about Disney, but in this case . . . ,” a third colleague told me.)
My colleagues may have been curmudgeonly about Disney, but nowhere near to the degree of the king curmudgeon himself, Hayao Miyazaki.
The Times article goes on to describe how Miyazaki had formed the studio in 1985, when he couldn’t find anyone to distribute his work, and had named it after a word for “hot wind” which he felt was needed to blow through what he saw as stagnant Japanese animation of the time. He is the ultimate control-freak about the creative process, hand drawing all of the storyboards and tinkering with individual frames before signing off on finished work. His reverence for and attention to detail in portraying the natural world is legendary. His movies deal with nature in an all-encompassing way. They involve fantastical and hybrid natural creations and events, but they also serve as allegorical origin stories, seeking to explain and explore the mysteries of our human relationships with nature in all its force and beauty.
He and his studio became known as the Disney of Japan, which he apparently hated. But being associated with Disney wasn’t the only thing he hated. The man seemed to despise, loathe, or hold general negative views on a wide range of subjects, including the ability and competence of his own adult son to oversee the studio.
Of course, Walt Disney was also known as a controlling overseer. He founded his own studio for similar reasons. He cranked out product at a similar pace. His films became ubiquitous in the U.S., as Ghibli’s did in Japan. His films received worldwide acclaim, the way Ghibli’s have. Maybe there was something to the comparison. (Interestingly, although Walt Disney is viewed in the popular imagination as a racist and anti-Semite, a review by the film critic Richard Brody of a massive Disney biography indicates that there is scant evidence to support either claim, the existence and ongoing saga of Song of the South (1946) notwithstanding.)
Obviously the phrase “the Disney of Japan” is just shorthand, but shorthand tends to stick, especially in the U.S., much to Miyazaki’s irritation. Obviously the two sensibilities are completely at opposite poles, with as many differences between the two as there are between Ghibli Park and Disneyworld. Shorthand can only get you so far. Only a cranky, old, animation master, or a late-to-the-game, movie-blogging dad would bother trying to engage with such a phrase at face value. The two worlds can be enjoyed separately, distinctly, for their own pleasures and on their own terms.
The climax of Ponyo involves the sea-goddess mother finding the child and, in welcoming her back into her proper environment, setting nature and the world back into peaceful order. It’s a sequence not entirely unlike the climax of Moana, in which Te Fiti is made whole and peaceful again by the restoration of her emerald-colored heart-stone.
“It’s weird how there’s no real bad guys in these movies,” the older said.
The closing credit rolled and we all sang along with the Ponyo song. “Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo / Fishy in the sea / Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo / Magic sets you free / Ponyo, Ponyo, Ponyo / Little girl with a round tummy.”
The happy, schoolyard melody got stuck in our heads for the rest of the evening, but by the next day none of us could remember how it went.
XulaDad 