Ponyo - the magical fish with a face

The sixth instalment of 'weird film night' at my new house this Tuesday had us watching last year's Studio Ghibli animation 'Ponyo'. This was the second Japanese animation in a row for weird film night (last time was 'Akira'), which proves that either Japanese animation is well odd or that we in the west don't really get it.

Ponyo is a story about a fish (with a face) called Ponyo who gets found trapped in a glass by a little boy. As the boy plays with Ponyo and feeds her, Ponyo reveals magical powers and demonstrates the ability to talk. After playing with the boy for ages, she starts to slowly turn into a girl. I guess in one sense this is standard fairy tale stuff, but there's something about Japanese animation that makes everything seem totally otherworldly, which makes the film seem a lot weirder than it would if the same story were told using a Western style.

We watched the version that had been dubbed over with English-speaking actors. There were some big names in there, mainly Liam Neeson and Cate Blanchet as the wizard and goddess of the sea. Tina Fey voices the mother of the young boy who befriends Ponyo, a fantastically comic character who seems like a great mum despite demonstrating some outright dangerous parenting. Something is always lost in the translation though, this is both a bane and a boon for films like Ponyo as deadly serious lines in the original sometimes take on an unintended but welcome comic tone. When Liam Neeson mumbles to himself about having to turn Ponyo back into a fish so that "...the balance of the world is not upset...", it's hard to take him seriously - but maybe that's not the point.

I think that's why I sometimes have a hard time with Japanese animation, I often can't quite get the point they are trying to make. I can never quite work out if they're being deliberately tongue-in-cheek or if a translation / cultural reference that should be deep or serious has gone wrong. In the end I sometimes feel a little lost. This shouldn't detract though from the film's visual experience though, and the fact that at its heart the film is a funny and endearing fairy tale.

"Ponyo like HAM!"