SYNOPSIS:
From the Academy Award®-winning director and world-renowned Japanese animation legend Hayao Miyazaki comes a story inspired by Hans Christian Andersen's classic fairy tale "The Little Mermaid." The daughter of the king of the ocean, Ponyo is no ordinary goldfish -- she has all the magic of the sea at her disposal. But when five year old Sosuke befriends the spunky little fish near his seaside home, a special connection sparks between the two. Ponyo yearns to become human, and transforms into a little girl, which awakens an ancient spell and causes an imbalance in nature, putting the entire world in danger. Now Ponyo and her friends must embark on an epic adventure to save the world, and it will take some help from the greatest powers in the ocean to make things right again.
A quirky fairy tale with an environmental message, this visually stunning fantasy also features an outstanding roster of voice talent, including Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Cloris Leachman, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin, Betty White, Frankie Jonas and Noah Cyrus as Ponyo.
REVIEWS:
An environmental apocalypse is coming. It's a sentiment that Hayao Miyazaki has been including in his animated films for decades - never mind that many of his movies are rated G and include cute young girls, cuddly woodland creatures and anthropomorphic goldfish.
PONYO is one of Miyazaki's most kid-accessible movies, only half a shade darker than his 1988 masterpiece, MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO. But it's still an unnerving film, filled with memorable images of humankind on the precipice. The scariest part of the film isn't any monster or child in peril, but the grown-up characters' apparent obliviousness to the cataclysm going on around them.
PONYO, which already set box office records in Japan last year, is a loose retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid." In this version, a young boy named Sosuke discovers a strange goldfish with a human face near his seaside home. Sosuke and Ponyo become fast friends, but the fish-girl's father, an undersea alchemist with godlike powers, wants nothing to do with humankind.
"Humans are disgusting," he says, later adding: "They ruin the sea with their ugly black souls."
Miyazaki presents the world as anything but a utopia, with his idyllic drawings of young children and seaside cottages above ground contrasting roughly with the sludge and trash lining the bottom of the sea. But when a typhoon hits in the middle of the movie, the result is more surreal than menacing - like an anxiety dream where danger constantly threatens, but the worst never quite happens. The roiling waves always seem to be a few feet above the protagonists, held back only by imagination. The slow-moving, fanged prehistoric fish that swim under tiny boats never attack, but it's still hair-raising to see them there.
The English-language translation is better than most, with Tina Fey adding a modern spunkiness as Sosuke's mother. Liam Neeson is also perfectly cast as Ponyo's father, and Lily Tomlin, Cloris Leachman and Betty White are as warm as a cup of cocoa playing three women at a senior home.
Kids will understand the obvious moral of PONYO, about being yourself. But as it is with Miyazaki's layered worlds, there's an even more dire message for the adults in the audience: You can spend your life hurrying from Point A to Point B, unaware that the world is crumbling underneath your feet. San Francisco Chronicle
