Ponyo

Hayao Miyazake, the writer and director of Ponyo, we are told, has been attempting to retire since the late 1990s. It is extremely fortunate that the master’s retirement is, thus far, about as convincing as Frank Sinatra’s golf course years. Already in self-imposed exile when he produced Spirited Away, the Oscar winning film that many consider to be his masterpiece, Miyazake has since produced the lavish Howl’s Moving Castle and now Ponyo, his tenth film as a director.

Established Ghibli fans will immediately recognise the beats; at heart, this is an innocent, prepubescent romance that’s just as chaste as the Twilight kids and twice as adorable. It isn’t all cutesy-pie. Loosely based on The Little Mermaid and, like the Hans Christian Andersen story, there’s an angry king (Liam Neeson), fond siblings, a wise enchantress (Cate Blanchett) and the constant threat of being turned into foam. Forget the original or the soft soap Disney version; this is a much stranger place to be. Ponyo is a goldfish princess so the goalposts keep shifting; she’s like a little fish, sometimes she’s a mermaid, sometimes she’s a mischievous little girl. The object of her affections is not a prince but a five-year-old kindergarten student. And no upstart singing lobster could ever hope to match her wild supporting cast of oceanic characters.

No matter how fantastic the conceit, Miyazake’s flair for photorealism and biomechanics makes everything immediate and strangely plausible. In Ghibli World, soot can move like spiders, cats can look like ballerinas and Ponyo even manages a thrilling Duel inspired car chase against the sea. The sensational hand drawn animation reminds us why the director is known as the Japanese Walt Disney; Ponyo makes the viewer feel like a kid in a discombobulating way. The film’s sense of wonder is squarely matched by a feeling of bewilderment, the sensation that we’re not quite sure of the rules and will just have to make an adventure of it.