So, after some efort, I managed to watch Ponyo. I made a point to do so on this one, because like Cat Returns, its one of the ones I haven't seen before. Arriety and From Up On Poppy Hill I haven't seen either, and I'll try to make apoint to see them the week of as well. (Though comicon is coming up so I think I'll actually be out of town for Poppy.)
I haven't quite brought myself to re-watch Pom Poko, My Neighbors the Yamadas, Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle or Tales from Earthsea yet. I've seen Howl's and Spirited Away several times at least, and the others I just have no enthusiasm to watch again. It's just… harder to do when the thread is only a couple of super short responses and there's no real discussion going on. Hopefully I'll find some time in August... especially since we're almost through with the marathon and should be hitting up the pre-Ghibli stuff soon. Castle of Cagliostro at least I'm eager to talk about at length.
Anyway, Ponyo. [hide]
First off. The animation. While its very respectable for Miyazaki to want to keep it all traditional and hand drawn with no digital effects at all… that also worked against the movie a little. The shadows were missing all over the place, the colors weren't as sharp and crisp as they could be. I love the watercolor look in Lilo and Stitch, but here... while very well done and professional... at times it made the whole thing look slightly amateur... especially when Ponyo was being sort of blobby and deformed.
The whole affair was very blatantly an attempt to recreate the success of Totoro with a new mascot character (this is something Miyazaki himself has said... and it shows.) , but it lacked a lot of the subtly and charm of Totoro or Kiki or Whisper of the Heart. At least partly I think because totoro was so grounded in normalcy before the magical parts happened, and the magic bits were so brief... while this movie started witht he weirdness of Ponyo and kept her around the entire time... there was never a chance for any of it to really be special. (Until Ponyo's mother showed up anyway.)
Maybe its just a result of streaming through so many Miyazaki films now, but the sea king and his wife, while both kind of interesting, just didn't feel... I dunno. Magical or special. the old ladies just felt like yet another set of old ladies for no reason. Ponyo herself, didn't do anything for me, and Souske was a pretty straightforward child, without the pure... child-like quality that was captured in Totoro or Porco Rosso.
The whole movie was a sequence of short set pieces and slice of life without consequence like some of the earlier films, but for some reason, it just didn't click for me, and I can't really place why. There were magical beings that did things because they were magical and it was a visual to show off... and sometimes magic and spectacle for its own sake is just... overkill? Why did all of Ponyo's sisters turn into giant fish? WHy were there glowing magical fish that turned to sludge? Stuff like that. Weird creative details that Miyazaki throws in that are interesting visually, but... didn't really work for me. (I had a lot of similar problems with Spirited Away, but I really need to actually rewatch that.) It's okay for characters to have magic powers, but when those powers do anything, are random, have no limits, and side effects that make no sense (It's going to crash the moon) and more and more powers and rules keep coming out of nowhere, its a bit of a mess.
The Little Mermaid for instance had two magic bits. "Triton's trident controls the weather" and "Ursula's spell makes Ariel a human and works out as long as Ariel gets kissed". And those two uses of magic were all that was really there for the whole movie. Ponyo... every five minutes a new magic ability came up. She can grow legs, she can turn her sisters into fish, she can make things grow, she can cause typhoons, she can learn to talk, if you kiss the bubble she becomes human, etc.
It's hard to explain and encapsulate. The elements were there, the usual Miyazaki tentpoles of characterization were set up and there were a few interesting set piece ideas, but I dunno, it just didn't gel for me. I was never really hooked in, the momentum of the film never quite grabbed me. It's like the whole thing was just going by the numbers. It's not that it was bad perse... but it was kind of a weird mess.
I rather liked the opening five minutes with the jellyfish that was all silent. That was cool, very fantasia-esque.
The scene where they're driving through the storm while Ponyo runs on giant fish was very visually impressive, but as an adult I couldn't help but feel "Oh god, why are they driving in that kind of shitty weather? They're going to die and this is bad!" rather than the "ha ha, wow that's cool!" that you're probably supposed to feel. It's like Ponyo being childish was putting them in serious danger... but the movie glossed right over that fact, because that's not fanciful.
I also really liked the mother. She was a lot of fun, as was the crazy driving. And when she made noodles... and like the father in Totoro, just casually accepted when her son said there was magic going on. The sequence where they morse coded the spotlight towards the father out at sea was really nice, I liked that part. It had warmth and heart and some novelty to it. I kind of wanted the whole film to be about the mother, her son, and the father at sea... forget all the Little Mermaid stuff.
I guess that's also the problem... its very distinctly Miyazaki's Little Mermaid, so in my head it was comparing to the Disney version. And well, a gelatinous blob of a five year old in love has a hard time time competing against teenage Ariel in terms of sympahty and stakes... especially when both leads are unaware of the stakes the entire film, andits adults around them deciding what's going on... completely out of their influence. And Ponyo's father was no Triton... he was just sort of a wannabe version of Howl from the previous movie. (And it certainly lacked anything resembling Ursula).[/hide]
So, overall, didn't care for it. Not terrible, but didn't care for it. Probably won't watch it again.
Did really enjoy Cat Returns the other week though… so it's not as if I'm through and through cynical about all of the films I haven't seen yet.