Saw Ponyo a few nights ago. Highly recommended, but I do not want to give away plot details. Rather, I want to call attention to a murder that took place. A Disney-hired thug shot down this:

and replaced it with this monstrosity:

It’s hard to believe that they are (supposedly) the same song. The first is emotional, fun, bouncy, full of life. There’s expressiveness in the kid’s voice. The second sounds like I was sleep deprived and drunk and needed to turn in a song by the next day.. Sure, the first lacks “cool” (as if that’s what’s needed to make something kids like), while the second tries so hard to be cool, which only means that in 3 short years it will be worse than uncool. It will be like latter-era Elvis. FAIL

</rant>

Anyway, do watch the movie. Disney deserves credit for putting the effort (if sometimes misplaced) in bringing Miyazaki’s movies to the monolingual masses in America. I recommend watching it subtitled if you can read fast enough. If you’re watching it with kids then, yeah, you’ll probably want to dub it. Better yet, teach your kids Japanese! You know how kids have this annoying tendency to do things over and over again? Well, if your kid insists on watching this repeatedly, let them, but force them to watch it in Japanese with no subtitles subsequent times. That’ll teach ‘em.. Japanese, that is.

(read below for what I think of the movie, some spoilers contained)
As for the movie itself, there’s not much I can say without revealing the plot or saying what’s been said a gillion times. It’s not Miyazaki’s best movie, but it’s quite good. I knew I was going to like the movie when the very first scene contained Trilobites! That, and countless other Cambrian organisms.. Also, in a sea of Miyazaki “forest” movies, we find an ocean movie. Loosely based on Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, there are no mermaids, but the human-faced fish offspring of a mad sea-scientist and some sort of sea elemental or sea Goddess. Oh, but the girl does still have red hair (but so do all her sisters).

One theme that’s strong in the movie is something you see quite a bit in a lot of his recent movies – morph. Characters oscillate at different speeds in different directions at different times towards different forms. It is almost as if suggesting you don’t have an essential nature, but you are the sum product of events that occurred to you, and decisions you made. The sisters, too, morph at one stage into giant fish, and in turn to great tsunami waves and also for a brief second into beautiful girls alongside their mother. Indeed, her sisters are more like a mass than a collection of individuals – very Japanese.

The other theme is something reminiscent of My Neighbor Totoro – the seeming ability of most of the characters to not by shocked by the strange universe Miyazaki made for us. I know this isn’t just a Japanese thing, since even my wife thinks it odd that none of the characters (except the grumpy old lady who correctly portented the human-faced fish bringing tsunami) finds the fish’s appearance odd. His mother only thinks she’s cute. Even the appearance of the girl, revealing herself to having been the boy’s former pet fish didn’t even close to get the reaction I would expect in the real world – I would come running to the hills! But then again, in a world full of spirits, people get used to spirits. You say you believe in X, but would freak out completely if you ever met X. Miyazaki’s atheism and his coming from a culture that’s borderline animistic (and, formerly, much more than borderline) meet together in his art and it’s lovely.