A World In Crisis, And Only Love Can Save The Day

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Ponyo (left) and Sosuke learn the power of true love — and of what lies under the sea — in Hayao Miyazaki's enchanting animated fable Ponyo. Nibariki-GNDHDDT hide caption

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Ponyo (left) and Sosuke learn the power of true love — and of what lies under the sea — in Hayao Miyazaki's enchanting animated fable Ponyo.

Nibariki-GNDHDDT

Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo is a very loose adaptation of The Little Mermaid, and it's more straightforward and kiddie-friendly than such multilayered masterpieces as his Spirited Away.

But in some ways the movie's simplicity lets you see the director's greatness more clearly. It's about an event that throws the natural world into an uproar, collapsing the boundaries between earth and sky, fish and human. True love must save the world.

And yeah, it's corny — but it's not fatuous or hypocritical. We constantly see movies that contradict their own messages: celebrations of mavericks that are slavishly formulaic, testaments to the power of selfless love that are suffused with snobbery and narcissism.

But when Miyazaki makes a film that decries the threats to the natural world from human selfishness and pins the hope for survival on a kind of feminine over-soul that connects us all, the message is right there in the animation.

In its most startling frames, the title character — a fish who turns into a little girl to be with a boy named Sosuke — runs on top of the turbulent waves during a fierce typhoon, and those waves are suddenly huge dark fish that dissolve back into waves and then again into fish and again into waves as the girl is carried forward.

I won't diminish Miyazaki's art by pinning it down with a label like "pantheism," or invoking the Buddha. The point is that nothing in Miyazaki's universe ever stops transforming: In trees and stones and ripples on the waves, there seem to be spirits tucked away, ready to turn what you think you see — the visible world — into something else entirely.

Before I get too high-flown, let me say that Ponyo is unsullied by Disney's English-language casting (much maligned on the Internet) of Miley Cyrus's little sister as Ponyo and one of the dread Jonas brothers as Sosuke. The biggest star to lend his voice, Liam Neeson, has gravely splendid pipes as Ponyo's father, a once-human wizard who lives underwater and despises humankind for polluting the planet.

The early scenes — before the narrative kicks in — recall Yellow Submarine, with the father in a blue candy striped jacket and flowing hair, acting as a kind of undersea ringmaster as little fish with waifish faces circle around him. He keeps his precious daughter in a bubble; he's afraid she'll be carried to the surface.

But she is anyway, on a passing jellyfish — and before her father can rescue her, the wee fish gets a sip of human blood and begins her evolution into a girl. The natural world goes mad as the moon descends and oceans rise, and it falls to young Sosuke to make things right by proving his love for Ponyo is true.

Even with its radiant colors and Joe Hisaishi's score — an improbably lush mixture of Wagner, Shostakovich and Disney's Snow White — Ponyo has the potential to be insipid. But Miyazaki proves why two-dimensional hand-drawn animation will always be more thrilling than 3-D or stop-motion: It doesn't even need to pretend to be bound by the laws of physics. The borders between form and content, flesh and spirit, are magically fluid.