What an interesting version of The Little Mermaid Ponyo makes. It is so much truer to the original than the good ol' Disney Version. Consequently, really, it is far from my favorite Studio Ghibli film. It avoids all those thorny issues brought up by Anderson and Disney Studios (highlighted by some skits by Adam Grabowski) such as: she just became human and can't talk, and how much younger than that guy is she? Wrong on so many levels. At least to our current society.
In Ponyo, the 'prince' and the 'mermaid' are at least both, like, four (or "five", whatever). But that is pretty young to be making "big decisions" that will, of course, save the entire freaking world, man!
Other than that, Ponyo suffers from a consistent problem with a lot of literature that comes out of japan: there's a ton of exposition. Perhaps people just talk like that in Japan, there are some cultural differences, but I've never heard it. It always breaks me out of the story to hear a character telling another something like, "you're my daughter, because I'm your father; I was there when you were born on the 13 of December, 2005 which makes you five years old! Did you know you were 5 years old?"
As with any Hayao Miyazaki movie, there are some environmental overtones which I always appreciate. But none of it makes sense here. Love is cool and all, but it isn't going to save the world from a bizarre release of Devonian creatures. It was kinda spiffy to see them animated out, and watch a five year old swimming with them, but just because it was "the age of fish", doesn't mean an explosion of aquatic life will lead to some sort of necessary 'devolution'.
Ponyo is a fun movie, it's about as good as it can be, but it is itself something of a "Devolution" from Hayao's older movies. I would rather see Howl's Moving Castle.
No comments:
Post a Comment