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Loosely adapted from Hans Christian Anderson's The Little Mermaid, Hayao Miyazaki's long-awaited follow-up to Howl's Moving Castle will have you laughing all your way back to childhood says Peter Wild.

Ponyo - Hayao Miyazaki’s long-awaited follow-up to Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle - is, perhaps not unexpectedly, both similar to and wholly different from what we have come to expect from Studio Ghibli. 



Loosely adapted from Hans Christian Anderson’s 'The Little Mermaid’, the film opens in a strange amniotic bubble beneath the sea where Fujimoto (voiced in the English version by Liam Neeson), a flame haired stick insect of a man, is beavering away at some underwater magic while small red anemone-like creatures (later referred to as his daughters) engage in mischief.

One of the creatures steals away and finds herself in the bucket of a five-year-old boy called Sosuke. 

Sosuke is beguiled by the creature that he thinks of as a goldfish and names her Ponyo, doing his utmost to keep her safe as he travels with his young mother – but Fujimoto is not happy to see his daughter communing with the black-hearted humans and steals her back (summoning dark shadowy creatures from the drip and curl of water he cups in his arm). A bond, however, has been forged and Ponyo (as she now thinks of herself) breaks out of her father’s bubbly realm, unleashing all manner of magic into the oceans, with pillars of golden fish spewing into the sky, enormous pre-Cambrian fish resurrected from the deep and the moon drawn dangerously close to the Earth. Only Susuke’s love for Ponyo can save the world from damnation… 



Unravelling with a child’s logic (Susuke and his mother are, for instance, pursued by mad waves in their little car, with Ponyo running full tilt upon the whitecaps – until the three of them arrive home and eat some noodles with scant concern about the enormous storm raging outside) and lacking the occasionally otherworldly horror of Spirited Away, Ponyo is a gentle proposition, brimming over with the kinds of magical treats you don’t tend to see in animation any more (thanks to the fact that these days we coo over how ‘life-like’ things are).



All told, this is the kind of film that strips away the trappings of adulthood you wrap yourself in until you’re laughing and gasping and pointing and laughing as if you’re five years old yourself. By the time you reach the end credits you’ll be grinning and asking yourself if you’ve ever seen anything like it in your life – and then you’ll want to watch it all over again.

 

Peter Wild on 23rd April 2010
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