The ensuing adventure illustrates his burgeoning maturity, sense of responsibility, and the enrichment of having a pet, or best friend. He lives a lonely life until he finds Ponyo, the magical fish-turned-girl. In the film, SÅsuke is a boy who is mostly abandoned by his father (a ship’s captain), and is uninterested in the other kids at school. Again, Miyazaki uses location well, with the seaside village (modelled on Japanese port town Tomonoura) providing a rich, picturesque setting that is rendered beautifully in hand-drawn vistas, and watercolour waves that recall the art of Hokusai. Where Totoro was about moving home and coming to terms with a mother’s illness through discovering big friendly monsters in the local forest, Ponyo is a little more oblique. That film, as with Ponyo, attempts to display human – especially child – experience through a relationship with nature and imagination. Ponyo, in intent, is closest to My Neighbour Totoro ( Tonari no Totoro), a children’s classic made in 1988 that still charms and dazzles to this day. Miyazaki’s movies often work within the triangle of humanism, nature and fantasy, with only the pitch of core audience age being the distinctly differing factor. Here, Ponyo is a magical goldfish-like creature who, after escaping the clutches of her over-zealous sorceror father, ends up on dry land, and enters the life of a lonely boy called SÅsuke. Which is to say, Miyazaki takes the kernel of the story (in this case, a sea-bound creature wishing to be a human girl), and transforms it with Japanese imagery, locations and mysticism. Ponyo is Ghibli’s resetting of Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid, in a similar way to how Spirited Away was their appropriation of Alice in Wonderland. The Optimum-distributed UK release is today (a good few months after the majority of the world has already seen it), but a London audience was treated to a preview screening of the dubbed version of the film. So, no wonder that the latest film from Miyazaki and Ghibli, Ponyo ( Gake no Ue no Ponyo), is receiving plenty of attention. In the last decade in particular, his films – and the films of Studio Ghibli, the animation house he co-founded – have enjoyed a number of international hits (including Miyazaki’s own Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle) that have garnered acclaim and box office success the world over. A conjurer of animated dreams with line and colour as his wand and magic.
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