Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

I should probably start this of by mentioning that I worship pretty much anything I've seen from Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli so the amount of bias you're about to read cannot be classified as a proper review. On the other hand I will also not deny that I am a very casual Miyazaki fan in that I don't really know anything about the man except that he is the mind behind some of my favorite animated films. Hell, make that favorite films period. Classic works of animation such as Spirited Away, My Neighbor Totoro and Princess Mononoke are the ones that come to mind in an instance, and are only the tip of the iceberg because there are many more such classics. So you can imagine my excitement when I heard that there was a new Miyazaki film coming but I was still taken quite a bit by surprise when I saw the ads downtown for the new film Ponyo. They were actually going to play it in Swedish cinemas (!) and it didn't take me long to decide that I was going to finally see a Miyazaki film on the big screen.




Now you might expect me to describe the plot of this new film but since this is not really a review I will actually not waste time on such insignificant things. This might seem strange but if you actually see the film you will understand that this film is not a triumph of story but of the imagination, more specifically it is a triumph of a child's pure and innocent imagination as well as the joy of that. I was literally grinning the entire film ear to ear while my eyes were getting pretty teary from simple joy of what I was seeing on screen. I could probably spend hours talking about how impressive the old-fashioned way of doing animation was and how charming the soundtrack was and all the different themes that were going on in this film but none of that would describe how much I adored and loved watching this film. I ached to go back to my childhood to go back to the time before I started living with compromises of growing up and I felt nostalgia for that time when everything seemed possible and there was only good to be expected from the world and the future.



Ponyo is simply like watching a colorful canvas of imagination open up and take you to a place where you can experience and see things which were only common during your childhood daydreaming, but don't get the wrong idea though because you will never feel manipulated in a Miyazaki film. This film is the real deal and clearly not based on some checklist on what should happened and not in an animated film for all ages. It's really hard to put your finger on what makes this such a brilliant piece of animated work but you find yourself simply in love with this entrancing beautiful world that Miyazaki has created and you genuinely feel love for these hand-drawn characters and the riots of energy that they manage to create. Often I see Miyazaki's work summed up into "Magical!" in different reviews but for me personally that is an inadequate term this time for Ponyo - because while it is indeed magical - I could only think of one word during my viewing of the film and that word was "innocence" and with it Miyazaki breaks my hearts into a million pieces with pure joy.



Miyazaki not only manages to do this to me regularly with every film but he also makes it feel like a new thing every single time. These films always manage to grab a hold of me and sink me down the imaginary road of memory lane to a place where I know I am safe and loved. This is not a common thing, in fact it is a very rare thing that you won't get to experience too often when watching a film. Going into this blog I planned to rip on Disney and their incompetence these days compared to Studio Ghibli but now I barely feel like acknowledging their existence next to such genius works as Miyazaki puts out. These films that Miyazaki conjures from his wonderful imagination are not designed for any specific type of person, don't be fooled by the animation into thinking that this is for children. These films are for anyone who hasn't completely squandered the last bits of their childhood imagination, be they three years old or a hundred. Do not miss this one out!