Hayao Miyazaki’s tenth film opens with a boy and a jar. Sōsuke, five years old, lives on a clifftop above a fishing town. He finds a goldfish-like creature trapped in glass, breaks the jar with a rock, and cuts his finger. The creature licks the blood. The wound closes. That exchange — a small hurt answered by a small magic — is the whole engine of Ponyo, and it runs clean for 100 minutes.
Ponyo is a 2008 Japanese animated fantasy film, written and directed by Miyazaki, animated by Studio Ghibli for Nippon Television Network, Dentsu, Hakuhodo DY Media Partners, Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Mitsubishi, and distributed by Toho. It opened in Japan on July 19, 2008. The English-language version arrived on August 14, 2009, in 927 U.S. theatres — the widest opening for a Studio Ghibli film in the United States.
- Director: Hayao Miyazaki
- Writer: Hayao Miyazaki
- Runtime: 100 minutes
- Japanese release: July 19, 2008 (Toho)
- English release: August 14, 2009 (927 U.S. theatres)
- Worldwide gross: over $204 million
- Metacritic: 86/100
- Clay Tribune score: 8.6/10
Trailer, via StudiocanalUK.
A Goldfish Called Brunhilde
The creature’s birth name is Brunhilde. She is the daughter of Fujimoto, a misanthropic wizard who was once human and now lives underwater with her and her numerous smaller sisters — goldfish-like creatures with human faces. On an outing in his four-flippered submarine, Brunhilde sneaks off and floats away on the back of a jellyfish. A fishing trawler passes. She ends up in the jar.
Fujimoto believes she has been kidnapped. He is wrong, and his panic is the film’s first joke and its first threat. He sends wave spirits to recover her, and Sōsuke is left heartbroken and confused. Ponyo refuses to answer to Brunhilde. She wants the name the boy gave her, and she wants the body that goes with it.
That body arrives through theft. Ponyo licks Sōsuke’s blood and begins changing into a human on her own. Fujimoto forces her back. Then, with help from her sisters, she breaks away and uses his magic to make herself human outright. The magic she releases into the ocean unbalances nature and raises a tsunami.
Water That Comes for the Town
The tsunami is not a villain. It is a consequence, and Miyazaki films it the way he films everything else here: as motion with weight. Water climbs. The town goes under. Ponyo returns to Sōsuke, who is amazed and overjoyed. His mother, Lisa, lets her stay.
Lisa leaves once the water drops to check on the residents of the nursing home where she works. She promises Sōsuke she will come back as soon as she can. Then Gran Mamare arrives at Fujimoto’s — Ponyo’s mother, and the film’s true authority. What follows is a test, and the test is Sōsuke’s.
The voice cast is Yuria Kozuki as Ponyo, Hiroki Doi as Sōsuke, George Tokoro as Fujimoto, Tomoko Yamaguchi as Risa, Yuki Amami as Gran Mamare, Kazushige Nagashima as Koichi, Akiko Yano as Ponyo’s Sister, Shin’ichi Hatori as Anchorman, Tokie Hidari as Kayo, Rumi Hiiragi as Young Mother, Tomoko Naraoka as Yoshie and Kazuko Yoshiyuki as Toki. Wikipedia credits the Japanese leads as Yuria Nara and the same Doi, Yamaguchi, Nagashima, Amami, Tokoro, Hiiragi, Yano, Yoshiyuki and Naraoka.
The Case for Hand-Drawn Water
Miyazaki’s line here is loose in a way his earlier films are not. The sea does not behave. It swells into shapes that look like fish and then stop looking like anything. Ponyo runs across the tops of waves in a sequence that has no interest in physics and no need for it. The film’s tagline — “Welcome to a world where anything is possible” — is usually marketing noise. Here it is a description of the animation budget.
The visual design is the reason the film holds children and adults at the same time. A five-year-old watches a girl turn into a girl. An adult watches a director draw water by hand and win. It received critical acclaim for its uplifting themes, visual design, and simultaneous appeal towards young children and all audiences. That last phrase is the hard one, and Ponyo earns it without a single wink at the parents in the room.
There is no sarcasm in this movie. There is no second layer. Fujimoto is a misanthrope who was once human, and the film does not ask you to laugh at him or forgive him. He is a father who lost a daughter and got her back wrong. That is enough.
100 Minutes, No Fat
The runtime is 100 minutes, and it moves. Miyazaki does not build to the tsunami; he spends it early and lets the aftermath carry the back half. Lisa’s departure is the smartest structural choice in the film. It removes the adult, hands Sōsuke a responsibility he is too young for, and refuses to make the boy’s competence cute.
The magic has rules, which is rare in a fairy tale this loose. Ponyo’s transformation comes from Sōsuke’s blood. Her power is borrowed from Fujimoto. Her excess of it damages the world. The film never explains the system and never contradicts it, which is a harder trick than either.
The gross tells you what happened commercially. Ponyo made over $204 million worldwide and became the eighth-highest-grossing anime film of all time. That number is not a review. It is evidence that a hand-drawn film with a five-year-old protagonist and no villain worth the name found an audience in 2008 and kept it.
Where the Film Slips
The imbalance in nature is stated, not shown. Ponyo’s magic causes a tsunami, and the film tells us the ocean is out of balance, but the damage stays mostly offscreen — a flooded town, a submerged road, a nursing home we hear about. Miyazaki is more interested in the boy and the girl than in the cost, and the cost is the one thing here that feels underdrawn.
Fujimoto is the other soft spot. He is a powerful sorcerer, a former human, and a father who calls his daughter by a name she has rejected. The film gives him a submarine with four flippers and a grudge against humanity, then mostly leaves him to fret. George Tokoro’s performance is fine. The character is thinner than the design deserves.
Gran Mamare arrives late and settles everything. She is a dea ex machina in the most literal sense, and the film does not pretend otherwise. Whether that reads as myth or as a shortcut depends on how much you want the rules enforced. Ponyo does not.
Why the Ending Works Anyway
Because the test is not a battle. Sōsuke has to prove something about Ponyo, and the film keeps the terms simple enough for a child to follow and strange enough that an adult cannot quite predict them. The boy who cut his finger in the first scene is the boy who answers in the last. That is a closed loop, and Miyazaki closes it without a speech.
The English-language version was produced by The Kennedy/Marshall Company and released by Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures. It reached 927 theatres, the widest Studio Ghibli opening in the U.S. at that point. That is a distribution fact, not an artistic one, but it matters: this is the film that put Miyazaki in front of a mass American audience in a way his earlier work had not managed.
The eighth film Miyazaki directed for Studio Ghibli, and his tenth overall, sits between the dense fantasy of his 2000s work and the quieter films that followed. It is not his most ambitious. It is his most generous.
What the Boy Promised
Ponyo is a film about a boy who keeps a promise and a girl who chooses a name. It is drawn by hand, scored to its own logic, and built for an audience that has not yet learned to be embarrassed by wonder. The tsunami is a consequence rather than a punishment. The wizard is a father rather than a monster. The mother leaves and comes back.
What holds it at 8.6 rather than higher is the thinness around the edges — the unshown cost of Ponyo’s magic, the underwritten Fujimoto, the late arrival of Gran Mamare to tidy what the film could have let stay messy. What holds it at 8.6 rather than lower is everything else: the water, the blood, the jar, the boy on the cliff who does the right thing twice.
The film is 100 minutes. It was released in Japan on July 19, 2008, and in the U.S. on August 14, 2009. It grossed over $204 million. It holds an 86 on Metacritic. None of those numbers explain why a five-year-old licking a cut finger is one of the best images in Miyazaki’s filmography, but they are the record, and the record is good.
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