Sosuke is just an ordinary 5 year old boy, living his everyday life in a Japanese port town. The son of a sailor, he spends most of his time in the care of his mother, the over-burdened Risa, either playing around at the beach in front of their cliffside home, attending preschool, or visiting the retirement home his mother works for to visit with all the friendly old ladies. One day, when playing on the beach, he encounters a strange, jumbo-sized goldfish, which he considers pretty despite her mutant alien-like appearance. This odd fish, whom he decides to name Ponyo, is actually Brunhilde, the runaway daughter of two of the ocean’s guardians, who desperately want her back... Because now that she’s tasted the human world(and a drop of human blood), her drive to become a part of Sosuke’s world threatens to tear reality apart and submerge the human world underwater. Can these star-crossed wuvvers overcome the odds, or shall a plague upon both their worlds render their meeting fatal?

So I’ve only reviewed a handful of Studio Ghibli films in my career, and while I may have tackled one of their lower-key titles last year, it’s been a few years since I reviewed a proper Hayao Miyazaki-directed film. The budget, as such, was obviously extremely high, and the animation is absolutely phenomenal. Movement is constantly smooth and expressive, and I’m honestly not sure if they had to employ any budget saving tactics to make ends meet... There are a few decisions I could point at, but they’re so obvious and striking that they look more like intentional design choices than anything else. For one example, one of the most difficult things to animate is moving water, and they rectified this potential problem by drawing the water as giant fish spirits, a genius move that most viewers won’t think twice about. The only time they employ the infamous ‘runny eggs’ technique is when animating Brunhilde and her sisters, which gives them an appropriately otherworldly feel.

Speaking of underwater, there are a ton of sea creatures present throughout the film, and while it might be a bit disorienting to see life forms from all over the ocean(including different depths) and some that are definitely supposed to be extinct all co-existing together, I guess it makes sense, since they’re hanging around a sea wizard? But more importantly, they all look very cool, especially the large prehistoric bony fish who get a generous amount of screen time. As for the people, they all look fairly cartoony in design, and while that’s nothing new from any work directed by Hayao Miyazaki himself, there also appears to be kind of an off-putting Klasky-Csupo edge to all of it. People mostly look proportionally accurate save for their textbook anime faces, at least among the adults... I weirdly find the old ladies far more adorable than the kids... And the children look disquietingly like they were pulled from a nineties Nickelodeon show, and then you have a couple of very strange exceptions.

The reaction most people tend to have with the title character Ponyo is that she’s either adorable, or terrifying. There’s not a whole lot of middle ground there. I guess I’m on both sides of the fence, depending on which part of her transformation I’m seeing... She’s cute enough in her full child form, but anything below that is unsettling at best, like when she’s this human-faced goldfish that only one person finds strange, or she’s straight up disturbing at worst, like when she’s popping out chicken limbs. Then you have moments when she’s in human form, but her face slips just enough to fish form that if I were anywhere nearby, I’d abandon ship and pray for the jaws of a great white shark to save me from her. Another exception is Ponyo’s father, this weird looking crooked-nosed dude with gravity-defying hair. I don’t know, he’s not scary-looking, but I’m not a huge fan of his design. He looks like dyed-hair Howl after a three year crack bender.

The music is kind of a mixed bag... There’s some beautiful orchestral music from Joe Hisaishi, and while I’m not sure how to explain this, it’s arranged in a way that even hearing it out of context, you just know somebody’s having an adventure under the sea. Adding operatic vocals was a brilliant move, and I appreciated the inclusion of Ride of the Valkyries as a nod to one of the film’s many influences, Richard Wagner. I guess the closing song would slap for you if you were watching as a kid... Which, I guess, is all that really matters when you consider just how young an audience this movie was meant for... But to me, it sounds like radio Disney trying to recapture the magic of the far more charming and timeless My Neighbor Totoro theme. It’s also worth noting that the two lead child actors were the ones who sang the song, and yeah, maybe not the best decision if they were aiming for any sort of longevity. Totoro’s theme sounds like it’s being sung for children by an adult with enough vocal training to make the vapid lyrics palatable enough so that the kids hearing it for the first time can revisit it decades later without cringing, and I can not see the Ponyo theme achieving the same kind of timeless nostalgia when it’s being sung by the child siblings of Miley Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers.

Speaking of which, that’s who they picked to play the leads... Noah Cyrus, who at least has the raw enthusiasm required to play a character like Ponyo, is still really screechy and hard to listen to. Frankie Jonas sounds twice Sosuke’s age(which they both were at the time, and I’ll give Noah some extra credit for at least sounding the right age) and his performance is a bit bland... But then again, so was his character. I know it sounds harsh to criticize the acting abilities of children, but it’s not impossible to find good child actors, and I firmly believe if Disney had held actual auditions instead of trying to cash in on the name recognition of a couple of famous pop singer families, the final product would have been far better off for it. The rest of the cast is also predictably full of celebrities, but none of them really stand out except in a distracting “I know that voice” kind of way. Matt Damon only has a few lines, but hey, you got THAT name to slap on the DVD. Tina Fey does a decent job as Sosuke’s mom, and while it was super sad to hear Betty White and Cloris Leachman playing two of the old ladies, they did manage to steal the show in their handful of scenes.

The inspiration for Ponyo wasn’t just The Little Mermaid, although that’s probably the one you’ve heard the most. The classic Hans Christian Anderson fable has been adapted to anime form before, as well as a far more iconic Disney version around a decade later. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it adapted this loosely, or in such a broad, imaginative way. Hayao Miyazaki took cues from all kinds of literature around the world, from Buddhism to Norse Mythology, and even some spiritual Japanese mythology, allegedly the inspiration for Ponyo’s goldfish design. There’s also a hint of Romeo and Juliet, but you could argue every retelling of The Little Mermaid contains those elements, whether intentional or not. With one of the most legendary directors in anime history leading the project, and with this much high-brow influence and no shortage of disposable income behind it, this was a fairly ambitious title. The end product, however, is the most WTF movie that Studio Ghibli has ever released.

Now don’t get me wrong, Ponyo was successful. It was produced with an estimated 34 million dollar budget, and it made its money back with a worldwide gross of over 200 million. It won a bunch of awards(although the Globes and Oscars didn’t even give it a nomination), and it was a hit both critically and commercially... So why has it become so divisive over the last few years? One thing I’ve noticed while reading reviews for the film is that even when people are giving it positive scores, they still make a ton of caveats, and there are more reviews than I can count that cite issues with the plot, the pacing, even the main characters, with the film’s main saving grace being ‘that Ghibli magic.’ And that Ghibli magic is there, don’t get me wrong, but I’m kind of weird insofar as the fact that I’m immune to the Ghibli magic. The Ghibli movies I like are the ones where I can point to a specific thing I like about them, like the stories and characters, rather than anything emotionally potent. And I’m sorry, I don’t like Ponyo all that much.

The first thing I should address is that unlike most Ghibli movies, this is aimed explicitly at younger audiences. I know that shouldn’t be a criticism, as hey, they’re kids' movies, right? Well, no, most Ghibli movies are good because they’re accessible to kids, but still perfectly serviceable for adults, either due to clever writing, heavy themes of nostalgia, or both. There are other Ghibli films aimed just as young, but they tend to lean towards being widely despised like Earwig, or heavily comedic like The Cat Returns. Ponyo kind of reminds me more of Spirited Away than those two, at least in the feel that I get from it... The feel that Hayao Miyazaki had a grand idea in his head, he wanted to put it to film primarily for the benefit of some children he knew, and that he probably made the story up as he went along and didn’t have a finished script or even a finished outline ready until late in production. I’m not a huge fan of this approach, as it creates a lot of strange details and hanging plot threads that never get addressed, and Ponyo is full of both.

Like, for example, Sosuke’s mother is kind of the worst. I get that parenting alone is hard, my mother took care of me by herself while my dad was in the navy, but she also watched over me and kept me safe. Risa lets five year old Sosuke climb down a steep, wet rocky cliff by himself to play on the beach, inviting any number of serious injuries should he slip and fall. She power-walks ahead of him while he struggles to keep up while she’s buying groceries, she drives like a psycho and leaves him unattended during a storm... She lets him bring a strange sea creature he just found and is keeping in a bucket in the car with him, as well as to school, instead of doing what any other parent would do and tell him to leave it home. She acts like a spoiled brat over her husband having to work late... Which I guess is a product of Miyazaki’s unplanned writing, since this plot point is never resolved... and while I’ve gotten tired of that trope where kids don’t understand their parents having to work to support them, seeing the roles reversed to the point where the five-year-old is the emotionally supportive one is NOT better.

But it’s not just her, the vast majority of exchanges and reactions in this film making a jaw-droppingly little amount of sense. Sosuke’s reaction to the ocean growing literal eyeballs to stare at him is just “Weird...” One of his classmates who I’m pretty sure we never see again calls Ponyo ‘boring,’ which is not the word I’d use to describe her. It doesn’t seem to matter whether she’s kept in salt water or fresh water. When Sosuke's father sees a child running on waves in the open ocean, his only reaction is that she looks Sosuke's age. The only person in the entire film who has an appropriate reaction to how bizarre Ponyo looks is an old woman who only freaks out so she can warn everyone that her appearance will cause a tsunami, which... I guess must be something from Japanese mythology? Maybe? It’s also the only connection we get between Ponyo’s ambition to become human and the stakes of the story, which... Well, let’s just rip the band-aid off as quickly as possible, given Japan’s recent history with natural disasters, hasn’t aged well. Seeing people chilling in boats, seemingly not caring that they’ve just lost their homes and all their possessions, is incredibly hard to watch even for a dumb American like me.

But my biggest issue with the movie isn’t the over-complicated plot or the ram-shackle pacing, like it is with a lot of people. My biggest issue with Ponyo, and I can’t believe more people don’t have a problem with this, is the fact that it’s a love story between two toddlers. And I don’t mean some cute guppy-love story, oh no, Ghibli’s done that kind of thing really well before. This is a love story with life-long implications. Ponyo falls in love with Sosuke because he’s the first human she meets, and he gives her ham. Sosuke... Thinks she’s pretty, I guess? Their confession of love and Ponyo’s decision to live as a human are supposed to save the earth and prevent her from turning into sea foam, but, like, they’re five. What they have is barely an infatuation, should really just be called a close friendship at this point, and it’s not going to last forever.

You ever heard of the Westermarck effect? When two people are raised in close quarters through their formative years, they become romantically and sexually desensitized to each other. Considering the fact that Ponyo doesn’t know anybody other than Sosuke and his mother, and their town just lost a ton of housing due to the flood, I don’t think she’s going to have anywhere to stay other than his house, and by the time they’re teenagers, they’re going to have formed enough of a sibling dynamic that unless they’re both significantly messed up in the head, they’re going to look elsewhere when they start dating. What happens then? Will the flood come back? Will Ponyo turn into sea foam anyway? Yeah, I can forgive the overly complicated plot, but even if I saw this as a kid, the actual prospect of Sosuke and Ponyo’s romance would have bugged the carp out of me. I couldn’t even watch The Santa Clause back then because I was like ‘wait, if the adults don’t believe in Santa, but he’s real, who do they think buys the presents they didn’t buy?” Again, I was a weird kid, I noticed shit like that.

There are a few things I like in it... Like I said before, the old ladies are fun, and it does warm my cold shriveled heart to see them running around towards the end. I like Ponyo’s mother, she seemed really nice. I actually really enjoy the morse code scene, which is the only scene that legitimately got a laugh out of me. The animation is amazing, the underwater landscape is beautiful and the eclectic array of marine life probably would have been my favorite part of the film if it had come out when I was a kid(Seriously, those dinosaur fish are the fucking coolest), but over-all, it doesn’t do anything for me. I guess it’s partially because it wasn’t a part of my childhood, so I don’t have the same appreciation for it that a lot of people have, but there have been a lot of modern day childrens’ media that I’ve enjoyed as an adult, so maybe it’s just not for me.

Ponyo has been widely available in the states for nearly a decade across countless different physical releases, but is currently available from Gkids.

I feel like I’d have a lot more tolerance for this movie if it wasn’t a love story, and the focus was instead surrounding a powerful friendship between worlds, but even then, their connection would feel almost entirely incidental and random. I don't dislike Sosuke, but there really isn't anything special about him, even from a narrative perspective. It may sound like I'm asking for something unreasonable, but the thing is, I'm not. What this movie reminds me of far more than The Little Mermaid is Lilo and Stitch, which did the entire concept of a lonely girl in a depressing family situation coming across an alien creature way, way better. Lilo was a weird, interesting, believable child character, and Stitch had to learn how to behave and accept love from her. They had an amazing dynamic, which was way stronger than this epic, world-saving romance between two drooling tiny tots. Changes like that might not make the movie good, but at least for me, it would go down a lot smoother, and I might be able to just ignore all of the other weird bullshit. If this movie was an important part of your childhood, or if it just speaks to you in a way it doesn’t for me, I don’t want to take it away from you, but for me, this is one of Ghibli’s weaker efforts.

I give Ponyo a 4/10.