To understand the films of animator and comics artist Hayao Miyazaki, the most financially successful filmmaker alive in Japan, you must do what is often done when looking at anime or manga and return to the start of the modern form(s), with Osamu Tezuka. And you'll find some glowing praise there, as you typically will, but Miyazaki is also far harsher than typical.
"
Because of the example he set [with Mighty Atom], he created the subsequent curse of the animation industry, of constantly low production budgets." So said Miyazaki in the pages of Comic Box, as quoted by Frederik L. Schodt in his book
The Astro Boy Essays. In all those essays, Miyazaki is the only person with unkind words for Tezuka, whose
Astro Boy (the English title of
Mighty Atom) provided both an indelible manga character and the birth of television anime; artist Naoki Urasawa's manga series
Pluto currently serves to update some of Tezuka's work with reverence typically reserved for the shrine.
Yet Miyazaki sits at the top of the world, perfectly capable of critiquing whatever he likes. He's an old animator, having started off at Toei Animation in the early ‘60s, which had been producing Disney-inspired color theatrical animation prior to the movement-limited b&w television boom of
Astro Boy; indeed, Tezuka himself had co-directed
Alakazam the Great, a Toei feature from 1960. But most viewers of ‘anime' don't take that into account; it's the longform television serials that count, many of which seem almost as limited in animation today as
Astro Boy was over 30 years ago, if more canny in framing and glossy in visual design. It's little surprise that Miyazaki rejects the ‘anime' label; it's just not his culture.
So here we are in 2009, and Miyazaki has yet another international movie smash on his hands:
Ponyo, a not-really-an-adaptation of Hans Christian Andersen's
The Little Mermaid concerning a little fish girl who wants to be human because she loves a little boy she met on land. It's closing in on $200 million in worldwide grosses, just over $8 million of which have come from the United States since Disney released the picture to theaters two Fridays ago. That's not bad for Japanese animation bereft of a video game or toy tie-in, actually, although I'm sure Disney wishes Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli -- founded in 1985 by Miyazaki and Isao Takahata, an older, adventurous director best known for his wartime tragedy
Grave of the Fireflies -- would edge a little closer to the Pixar range of things in terms of returning their investment, even if Disney's only ‘investment' in Ghibli is North American marketing and distribution and lining up name performers to create an English dub.
But all those heaps of box office receipts and John Lasseter's unlimited fandom aside, there's really little connection between Pixar's 3D pictures and Miyazaki's works. The former specialize in a type of polished comedic-adventure-of-self-discovery narrative, applicable to multiple genres and settings, while Miyazaki typically works in either a large-scale epic adventure mode (
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind,
Laputa: Castle in the Sky,
Princess Mononoke,
Howl's Moving Castle) or through whimsical fantasy pieces honed in on particular character personalities or desires (
My Neighbor Totoro,
Kiki's Delivery Service,
Porco Rosso). His Oscar-winning 2001 feature
Spirited Away effectively combines these two modes; it remains the highest grossing film in Japanese box office history.
Ponyo, in contrast, belongs firmly to the Totoro side of the Miyazaki catalog. It's also aimed squarely at young children, moreso than any of the man's work's since his scripts for the
Panda! Go, Panda! short movies of ‘72 and ‘73. The dead giveaway comes with the closing credits, over which a little kid and an adult sing a happy song in which the title character's name is mentioned 1,435,882 times at minimum, and said character's virtuous traits are duly hailed for all posterity, like this:
Ponyo Ponyo Ponyo/you are sure a fish
I'd like to catch you someday/and cook you in a dish
Ponyo Ponyo Ponyo/I hope you don't have bones
I pray for the intervention of St. Blaise
That's not an exact translation, mind you, but you get the picture. Disney saw fit to remix the track for their English release, with new vocals by Noah Cyrus and Frankie Jonas -- younger siblings of Disney-owned subsidiary entities Miley "Hannah Montana" Cyrus and the Jonas Brothers (non-exclusive) -- who also headline the English dub track. Also present are Tina Fey, Liam Neeson, and guest stars crammed into every available nook and cranny so as to approximate the all-star lineups of most big money American animated features these days - I think Matt Damon, Cate Blanchett and Cloris Leachman have maybe a dozen lines between the three of them.
Yet as money-minded as this is, in a way it complements the maximal style of Miyazaki's animated approach. This is far from limited animation, with very little of the penny-pinching scruples Tezuka introduced to the modern medium as its potential Original Sin; a nerve-jangling 170,000 frames of animation are involved, more than a few of them personally drawn by Miyazaki, who also directed, wrote and storyboarded the film, on top of drafting the preliminary character designs and setting down the color scheme, among other duties. In an effort to encourage loose, lively drawing, no computer imagery was utilized (and anyway, Ghibli had shut down its 3D wing), although the colors and (I presume) compositing are digital.
The details are different, but the attitude is nothing new. Looking to Miyazaki's grand comics accomplishment, the 1982-94
Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind manga, you're struck by how dense it is with visual and textual information, particularly for a fantasy adventure comic. Miyazaki has expressed admiration for the French artist Moebius, and his comic does often seem more European than Japanese in its hunger for space and its busy, stolid,
devouring environments, enough so that
some Japanese commentators have wondered if parts of it even functions all that well as manga. Even if it doesn't, an anti-manga comic of this sort fits well with Miyazaki's anti-anime animation, because it is full of activity and place and background and drawing drawing drawing.
How do the drawings work in Ponyo, though? With supervising animator Katsuya Kondo and art director Noboru Yoshida, Miyazaki presents a curious
mise-en-scène, one that often places simple, softly-colored characters against determinedly unrealistic illustrational backgrounds, which sometimes give the impression of undisturbed production art. The interaction between these two layers is smooth -- indeed, this is the sort of low-key, high-detail animated feature where watching characters navigate a stairway provides a set piece all its own -- but the totality of the
world remains patently fantastical.
Good thing then that Miyazaki is uninterested in realistic, logical storytelling. Instead, Ponyo relies on a quiet sort of surrealism, blending unexplained adult actions with some archetypical images, so as to communicate with its audience of young children on a primal level. When five-year old Sōsuke discovers little Ponyo -- and he'll give the fishy girl that name, a fittingly immediate Japanese onomatopoeia that suggests squishiness, thus favoring pure feeling over the portentous mythic pomp of the girl's birth name, Brünnhilde -- he's obsessed with keeping the human-looking fish girl alive, and the joys of discovering these mysteries of life segue directly into his acceptance of the girl later being able to talk, and walk - on water! How's
that for your literary cites?
Likewise, the world of parents is distant, unknowable. Miyazaki has never been entirely comfortable with villains, and Ponyo's protective father Fujimoto, an undersea magician who squirts out life from a rather phallic contraption (speaking of archetypes!), essentially functions as an ironic take on the villain's role in these things.
Allegedly based on supervisor Kondo, the frazzled, ice cream-striped Fujimoto has exceedingly vague plans to return the Earth to ancient, unpolluted times, which Ponyo manages to foil not five minutes after they're revealed, smack in the middle of the movie, thus causing her to become more human like Sōsuke. Fujimoto is mirrored by Sōsuke's less malevolent, more in-control busy father, a sailor who's never at home; some have declared this to be an allegory for Miyazaki's distant relationship with his son Goro (also a filmmaker), although the director has denied this.
Yet there's little doubting the power of what happens as Ponyo endeavors to live on land, the weather flying out of balance and the city becoming flooded, but in a bizarrely undamaging way, where nobody dies. Gradually, as if washed clean by this youthful effort, all of the film's adult characters come to accept the surrealism of the world; this is the film's true structure, the enthusiasm of childhood washing the adult world, wild as Miyazaki's beloved ecology. Details are unimportant; a conversation between Sōsuke's mom and a magical sea goddess is left entirely silent, and a folk tale-like test of Sōsuke's love proves to be almost absurdly easy, but that's really the point - to a child, there can be less struggle about accepting nature as it is, and respecting people for what they are, without the pollution of the adult world.
Oh, there's qualms to express, sure. The English voice acting is mostly decent -- Tina Fey is
excellent as Sōsuke's mom, actually, and Bonus Jonas acquits himself nicely -- but Cyrus comes off as a little too over-enunciating child actor-ish for Ponyo, and Neeson seems either miscast or misdirected, overloading his Fujimoto with gravitas when a more nervously human touch would have worked better (tellingly, his Japanese actor, George Tokoro, is a singer and comedian). There are no grand achievements seized by the characters, no overtly sophisticated goals to be had. Some have already grumbled that the film has little of substance to offer adults.
I think the film has an incredible
sensation to it, and an ability to transport the viewer into a childlike (but never child
ish) state, both wonderful and frightening - it's a whimsical picture, but a scene with little Sōsuke
freaking out over his lost mother is genuinely scary, as is his lack of understanding over Ponyo's magic, which is appropriately kept a secret from us as well. We're told just what we need of the film's magical ‘rules' to move forward; we can imagine the rest. Miyazaki's maximal visuals assure our passage, implying a wide world beyond our limited understanding that we might know if we grow up well, away from the compromises of adulthood, of our narrative parents, Osamu Tezuka and the rest. Fujimoto closes the film asking the children not to remember him unkindly. Who knows if they will - it's up to them.
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
