Ponyo: A Review
Last night, Mitsuko and I watched Gake no ue no Ponyo, or Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. This was a showing on TV, preceded by about an hour of background.
However, I found myself oddly disappointed with the movie. The animation, music, etc. wasn't bad, but the story never seemed to really come together, and at a certain point, it went over my threshold for unrelated weirdness or something. There's the thread of the fish who wants to become human, a father or wizard who wants to keep her dependent, his strange secret store of magic, a rather odd mother or ocean figure, and then there's this very strange "drowned" sequence towards the end where the old folks seem to be rejuvenated by living underwater, maybe? And then the climax, where the magic mother promises that a kiss will make Ponyo into a human girl?
Somehow, this all felt like a smorgasbord of partially digested visions, rather than a coherent story. Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) felt like a story, a coherent whole. Majo no takkyubin (Kiki's Delivery Service) felt coherent. Ponyo, on the other hand, felt stitched together and incomplete.
I'm still not sure who the protagonist was. Ponyo? The boy and his mother and father? Or maybe the oddly ambivalent father/wizard?
And what was the deal with the strange encounters in the drowned world, that isn't, exactly? I think the breaking point for me came when the mother and the old folks somehow were alive underwater. Ponyo, her father/wizard, even the enigmatic mother figure who is sometimes an ocean wave -- I could take that, I even enjoyed the intrusion of these magical figures into the "real" world, with the gritty normality of the boy, his family, friends, and the old folks.
But then they broke the rules, and had the old folks and his mother apparently romping underwater. And I gave up. After that, even the deus ex machina ending with the magical mother figure solving everything just seemed like added silliness.
I think perhaps they couldn't figure out how to resolve the movie. After all, his mother left, headed for the old folks' home. And the boy and Ponyo set out to find her. But there's no obvious way for Ponyo to become a human, especially as the dose of humanity gained from licking his blood earlier wears off. Unless... Hard to tell. But I think sticking with the realism of the old folks and mother would have made it better for me, even though it would have been more difficult to reach a clear ending.
However, I found myself oddly disappointed with the movie. The animation, music, etc. wasn't bad, but the story never seemed to really come together, and at a certain point, it went over my threshold for unrelated weirdness or something. There's the thread of the fish who wants to become human, a father or wizard who wants to keep her dependent, his strange secret store of magic, a rather odd mother or ocean figure, and then there's this very strange "drowned" sequence towards the end where the old folks seem to be rejuvenated by living underwater, maybe? And then the climax, where the magic mother promises that a kiss will make Ponyo into a human girl?
Somehow, this all felt like a smorgasbord of partially digested visions, rather than a coherent story. Tonari no Totoro (My Neighbor Totoro) felt like a story, a coherent whole. Majo no takkyubin (Kiki's Delivery Service) felt coherent. Ponyo, on the other hand, felt stitched together and incomplete.
I'm still not sure who the protagonist was. Ponyo? The boy and his mother and father? Or maybe the oddly ambivalent father/wizard?
And what was the deal with the strange encounters in the drowned world, that isn't, exactly? I think the breaking point for me came when the mother and the old folks somehow were alive underwater. Ponyo, her father/wizard, even the enigmatic mother figure who is sometimes an ocean wave -- I could take that, I even enjoyed the intrusion of these magical figures into the "real" world, with the gritty normality of the boy, his family, friends, and the old folks.
But then they broke the rules, and had the old folks and his mother apparently romping underwater. And I gave up. After that, even the deus ex machina ending with the magical mother figure solving everything just seemed like added silliness.
I think perhaps they couldn't figure out how to resolve the movie. After all, his mother left, headed for the old folks' home. And the boy and Ponyo set out to find her. But there's no obvious way for Ponyo to become a human, especially as the dose of humanity gained from licking his blood earlier wears off. Unless... Hard to tell. But I think sticking with the realism of the old folks and mother would have made it better for me, even though it would have been more difficult to reach a clear ending.