Ponyo Review

See it see it see it see it see it see it see it see it.



Now let me temper that.... It's not my favorite Miyazaki movie, but it might just be the most beautiful, with several sequences that literally just left me with my mouth hanging open stupidly. It's much more of a simple fairy tale than his last few movies (Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke), at least to my Western sensibilities. It's also aimed at a younger audience than those movies, not to take anything away from it.

There's a bizarre thing I've noticed with a fair amount of Asian movies--implied storytelling. In a culture where many social interactions and opinions are implied and hinted at rather than explicitly stated, I suppose that makes sense. There were moments in Ponyo when the characters would be somewhere new and talking about new characters and events as if they had been shown and discussed long before. This is a bit disorienting for me, because I'm a slow gaijin who needs it all spelled out for him.

Another movie in which I noticed this tendency was Infernal Affairs, the Hong Kong movie that The Departed was based on. I hated The Departed and loved Infernal Affairs, not least because Infernal Affairs is an hour shorter with the same storyline. In that case the implied storytelling helped the movie keep its pacing and efficiency, something that The Departed completely forgot about, in my opinion.

So go see Ponyo, although it's possible it will be ruined by the really poppy voice casting in America (Jonas and Cyrus siblings--new ones, too, I'm pretty sure they make them in a factory at this point).