The new film from Hayao Miyazaki will open in Japan this month. So the countdown for it coming stateside has begun. It’s already being called a classic.
The official Studio Ghibli website for it is
here now though (okay, so what if it is in Japanese, just click around it and explore!). Evidently it is geared for a younger audience than the last few and is closer in tone to MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO and KIKI’S DELIVERY SERVICE. The film is called PONYO ON THE CLIFF BY THE SEA.
The title character, Ponyo, is a girl fish with a human face who decides one day to leave her underwater home — and her school of smaller sisters — to see what lies on the surface. Riding on the back of a jellyfish, she is nearly trapped by a drift net, but escapes — with her head stuck in a glass jar. Sosuke , a boy who lives on a house on a seaside cliff, spots Ponyo in the shallows and rescues her. He is delighted with his new pet — and Ponyo is delighted to be in the human world at last. She says her first words, to Sosuke’s astonishment — and begins a transformation from half-fish to human.
Meanwhile, her human father, Fujimoto, who lives in an undersea manse with Ponyo’s sea-queen mother, starts to search for her. With his long hair, beaky nose and tormented, bags-under-the-eyes expression, Fujimoto looks like a decayed aristocrat from a shojo manga (girls’ comic), but he possesses magical powers over the waves, which become like living creatures under his command. What can a mere kid, if one with a feisty mom he calls Lisa, and a good-natured, if mostly absent, ship-captain dad, do to stop him?
I wonder what will the equivalent of the Cat Bus in this one?
