Ponyo

• 1. Introduction

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  Ponyo begins with a goldfish-like creature trapped inside a glass jar, drifting toward shore on the back of a jellyfish. That creature is Brunhilde, daughter of a misanthropic underwater wizard named Fujimoto, and the story of how she becomes Ponyo is the story of what Hayao Miyazaki was reaching for when he set out to make his tenth film as a director. Released in Japan on the 19th of July, 2008, Ponyo would go on to gross over $204 million worldwide, rank as the eighth-highest-grossing anime film of all time, and open in 927 theatres across the United States. How did a story about a five-year-old boy and a magic fish become a milestone for Studio Ghibli? What drove Miyazaki to abandon the computer graphics tools his studio had been developing for years? And why does a children's film about the sea contain deliberate echoes of a nineteenth-century German opera? Those are the questions worth sitting with.

• 2. A Town by the Sea

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  In 2004 and 2005, Miyazaki spent time in Tomonoura, a seaside town inside Setonaikai National Park. He was not there to sketch storyboards. He was there to absorb the community, its rhythms, and its particular quality of light on water. His experience in that town fixed the physical world the film would inhabit. While he was there, he read the complete works of Natsume Soseki. One novel in particular caught his attention: The Gate, which features a character named Sosuke who lives at the bottom of a cliff. That name and that setting gave Miyazaki the scaffold he needed for his young protagonist. The initial concept was almost entirely atmospheric. Miyazaki imagined a stormy sea with waves higher than a hillside house. Everything else grew outward from that single image. He later invented the name Ponyo because he felt it was an onomatopoeia of what soft, squishy softness feels like when touched. That instinct toward sensation over symbolism runs through every choice in the film.

• 3. Drawing by Hand

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  Before a single frame of Ponyo was animated, Miyazaki walked into the Tate Britain art museum and stopped in front of a painting. It was Ophelia, completed in 1852 by English painter John Everett Millais. Miyazaki later described the encounter plainly: "I thought, my work is shoddy compared to those artists. I was just astonished. At that point, it became clear to me. Our animation style could not go on as before." His colleague Katsuya Kondo had recently finished directing House Hunting, a 12-minute short made for the Ghibli Museum, which used solid and simple lines and was largely hand-drawn. During that production, Kondo had raised the possibility of applying the same approach to a feature. Once Kondo completed the short, he accepted an offer to become animation supervisor on Ponyo. Production formally began in May 2006. The computer graphics section at the studio was closed for the duration of the project to keep the focus entirely on hand-drawn work. This was a reversal of the direction Ghibli had been moving since Princess Mononoke used CGI in 1997. One of Miyazaki's stated goals was to animate ships frame-by-frame rather than drawing a single cel and sliding it across the screen, which had been standard practice.

• 4. Wagner Beneath the Waves

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  Ponyo's birth name, Brunhilde, is not a casual choice. It is a direct reference to the eldest of the nine legendary Valkyrie and to Richard Wagner's character Brunnhilde in the opera Die Walkure. The film's music also references that opera. Miyazaki's inspiration for the image of Ponyo riding a flock of fish came while he was listening to Ride of the Valkyries as he wrote a letter to his staff about committing to a more elemental animation style. That image, which he painted and titled "Ponyo is Here", became a scene in the finished film. The character of Sosuke, meanwhile, is modeled on Miyazaki's own son, Goro Miyazaki, at age five. Miyazaki also acknowledged his debt to Hans Christian Andersen. He recalled borrowing a copy of The Little Mermaid from a neighbor when he was nine years old and finding himself unable to accept the premise that the protagonist had no soul. Ponyo is, in part, a reworking of that story on different moral terms.

• 5. The Song Before the Film

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  Ponyo's theme song, "Gake no Ue no Ponyo", was released on the 5th of December, 2007, months before the film opened. It was performed by Fujioka Fujimaki, a duo made up of Takaaki Fujioka and Naoya Fujimaki, who were known for their underground band Marichans from the 1970s, alongside eight-year-old Nozomi Ohashi. The single entered the Oricon Weekly Charts top 100 on the 14th of July, climbed to 24th on the 21st, then to 6th on the 28th. After the film's release, it rose to 3rd on the 4th of August. By the end of 2008 it ranked as the 14th highest-selling single on the Oricon Yearly Charts. Ohashi also became the youngest participant in the 59th NHK Kohaku Uta Gassen, breaking the previous record held by Mai Hagiwara of Cute, who had been eleven. Following the ceremony, Ohashi announced she and Fujioka Fujimaki were disbanding their unit. An English-translated pop version of the theme was recorded by Noah Cyrus and Frankie Jonas to accompany the film's American release.

• 6. Records at the Box Office

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  Ponyo opened on 481 screens in Japan on the 19th of July, 2008, a record for a domestic film at the time, beating Pokemon: Giratina and the Sky Warrior, which opened the same day. In its first month it grossed the equivalent of $91 million in Japan alone, eventually reaching the equivalent of $153.1 million domestically by the 9th of November, 2008. Tokyo Anime Fair named it Animation of the Year for 2008. The American release on the 14th of August, 2009, opened on 927 screens. For context, Spirited Away had opened on 26 screens, Howl's Moving Castle on 36, and Princess Mononoke on 38. The English dub was directed by John Lasseter, Brad Lewis, and Peter Sohn of Pixar, and the English script was written by Melissa Mathison. Miyazaki traveled to the United States to promote the film, speaking at the University of California, Berkeley, and at San Diego Comic-Con. On its opening weekend in the U.S. and Canada the film earned $3,585,852 across 927 screens. Ponyo also holds a specific place in home video history: it was the last Studio Ghibli film released on VHS, and the first Ghibli film released on Blu-ray.

• 7. Critical Recognition

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  At the Venice International Film Festival, Wendy Ide of The Times called Ponyo "as chaotic and exuberant as a story told by a hyperactive toddler" and gave it four stars out of five. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times awarded it four out of four stars, writing that there is one word to describe Ponyo and that word is magical, and calling it a poetic and visually breathtaking work by the greatest of all animators. Rotten Tomatoes, compiling 174 reviews, found 91 percent positive, with an average score of 7.6 out of 10. Metacritic gave the film a weighted average of 86 out of 100 based on 29 reviews, indicating universal acclaim. The Japan Times gave it four out of five stars and compared it to My Neighbor Totoro. In awards, the film won five prizes at the 8th annual Tokyo Anime Awards in 2009, including Anime of the Year and Best Domestic Feature. Miyazaki took the awards for Best Director and Best Original Story; Noboru Yoshida received Best Art Direction. The 32nd Japan Academy Prize awarded Ponyo both Animation of the Year and Outstanding Achievement in Music. The film also received a special mention at the Bologna Future Film Festival. Dentsu's list of 2008 Hit Products in Japan ranked it second, behind only the Wii console, which points toward just how thoroughly the film entered popular culture that year.