Putting a Fine Point On It

There's no lack of imagination in "District 9" and "Ponyo," which can be a double-edged sword.

Sadly, “No, don’t you get it?” crops up all the time when I talk with film buffs about revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki. I’ve now seen most of his celebrated films, and my response to every one of them — from “Kiki’s Delivery Service” to “Princess Mononoke” to “Spirited Away” — is admiring befuddlement. Miyazaki’s shape-shifting imagery never falls much short of breathtakingly gorgeous, even if you’re not especially enamored (as I confess I am not) of the goggle-eyed, snub-nosed character design characteristic of anime.

And lord knows the man’s imagination knows few, if any, bounds. I just wish that his movies made even a little sense — that they didn’t all feel as if he were making them up as he goes along, pulling inexplicable new characters and bewildering digressions out of his ass whenever the story needs a little goosing. Fans often cite “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” but Miyazaki’s odd adventures never remotely approach the demented, rigorous illogic of Lewis Carroll, for whom each apparent non sequitur was a philosophical or mathematical conundrum in disguise. To their credit, Miyazaki’s films don’t feel as if they were made exclusively for children, but they often feel to me as if they were written by children.

“Ponyo,” his latest effort — the more evocative Japanese title translates as “Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea” — is a bit less random than usual, being a gloss on Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” The title character is an adorable female fish-creature with a humanoid face who runs away from home and winds up lodged in a discarded jar, from which she’s rescued by five-year-old schoolboy Sosuke. Her human-born-and-still-human-shaped-but-now-apparently-ichthyological father (see what I mean?) quickly sends scary-looking waves to fetch her home, but Ponyo, as Sosuke has since renamed her, uses some of dad’s hidden magic to transform herself into a human girl of about Sosuke’s age and races back across the storm-tossed sea to be with him. (The sequence of her leaping barefoot from crest to crest, keeping pace with Sosuke and his mom as they speed alongside the shore in their car, makes most of this summer’s Hollywood action set-pieces look pallid by comparison.) So far so good, but I have to stop there because I didn’t remotely follow the rest of the story, which involves the Japanese coast being swallowed by the ocean, a lengthy voyage in a magically resized toy boat, Ponyo’s unexplained (as far as I could tell) regression to her original form and a deus ex machina appearance by some sort of aquatic goddess, who I gather is Ponyo’s mother.

Needless to say, there’s enough visual splendor and charming sprightliness on hand to fully satisfy those who don’t insist upon knowing how and why they got from point A to point Z, and even hopelessly mundane nitpickers like myself will have a pretty good time. (That said, I gather from the response at Venice 2008, where it premiered, that aficionados consider “Ponyo” one of Miyazaki’s lesser works.) And while I took precautions and watched a subtitled version (in which Sosuke’s mom is called Risa rather than Lisa — a bit literal, that), word is that Disney’s English-language dub — featuring Noah “Miley’s sister” Cyrus as Ponyo, Frankie “yes, one of them” Jonas as Sosuke, Tina Fey as Risa/Lisa and Liam Neeson as Ponyo’s pop — doesn’t radically simplify the dialogue in the manner of some previous Studio Ghibli translations. Hopefully, you’ll get the full flavor of Miyazaki’s unique brand of nuttiness.

Mike D’Angelo is our guest critic for the month of August.

“District 9″ and “Ponyo” open in wide release on August 14th.

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