Last night, I went to a theater to see the latest Ghibli movie, Gake no Ue no Ponyo. I had a beer or two beforehand just to enjoy the novelty of beer in a movie theater, and as soon as the movie started, I found myself wishing I'd had a few more.
The plot of the movie is simple enough, but the presentation is so creepy, the execution so haphazard, and the scenes so mashed-together that only a drunk or a child can accept the flow of the movie without asking a whole bundle of questions. "What was the point of devoting a 5-minute scene to breast milk?"Â "Wait, why does everyone just accept the fact that this girl used to be a goldfish?"Â "Are we supposed to like the main character after he bashes the female lead with a rock and proceeds to blow off every single one of his friends in favor of a creepy goldfish-slug-girl-thing?"
Toward the end of the movie, so many miscellaneous things had occurred all jumbled together that when I tried to answer my own questions, I found myself unable to fill in the blanks. It's kind of sad to me that when you splice in the story of, say, BioShock with Ponyo, the movie makes a whole lot more sense than it does if you take the story at face value. When the underwater wizard Fujimoto drinks what seems to be fish DNA near the middle of the movie, it makes much more sense to consider it to be an Adam gene treatment than to think that he gets magic power from waving flashlights at giant squids. I'm not sure what that means, but I think it falls somewhere between "Miyazaki needs a good producer badly" and "Old man, you need to stop spending years drawing waves and think about crafting a more coherent story - you know, like you did before Howl's Moving Castle threw all that out the window."
I don't expect any of you to believe me that the movie is poorly constructed, since all the reviews of Ponyo I've seen on the English-speaking Internet have been overwhelmingly positive and Miyazaki has built up so much goodwill with wonderful movies. But when I talked to my friend RiceSuki in Shizuoka, he agreed with my assessment, saying "This movie is only for children, because anyone else will wonder what the fuck [Miyazaki] was smoking when he made it."
Aside from the jumbled narrative and strange visuals, though, I do admit that there a lot of bright spots in the movie. The characters, as with almost every Ghibli movie, are easy to like, especially Sousuke's mom Risa (voiced by Yamaguchi Tomoko, who J-drama fans will recognize from Long Vacation) and some of the old ladies at the nursing home she works at. The home scenes are really fun to watch, even though there are only two of them, and...
Hmm. That was it, really. So, yeah - I guess that overall, I didn't like the movie much. Time to cleanse my mental palate with Totoro, Nausicaa, and Cagliostro.
