Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008From http://www.ghibliworld.com/news.html#2611
regarding Gake no ue no Ponyo (崖の上のポニョ, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea) — Miyazaki’s most recent film.
“The US audience version, produced by Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, is to feature an all-star voice talent cast including Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Cate Blanchett, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin, Betty White, Fankie Jonas, Noah Cyrys and Cloris Leachman. Though one will not deny using stardom does not automatically guarantee a good voice dub, it will at least be useful in gaining the mainstream audience’s attention. Those wanting to find out what the end result will be still have the wait a bit though. Test screenings are currently being held, the final version will screen in US theaters in 2009.”
Here are some thoughts from former president Matt Fisher (used without explicit permission):
“So today I went down to see “Ponyo On the Cliff by the Sea,” despite my worries that it might possibly be dubbed (some kid’s movies are in Korea) and about my fairly low Japanese comprehension level. My concerns were groundless; the showing was subtitled, I surprised myself by catching most of the dialog, and the film was exuberantly, joyously, exhilaratingly good. Miyazaki has drawn back from the Baroque visual excess of his most recent works and returned to the relatively more simple—yet still boundlessly imaginative—100% hand-drawn style of his earlier works, and he has used that delightful style to create a picture that made me think of a cross between “The Little Mermaid” and Richard Scarry’s “Cars and Trucks and Things That Go” (my favorite childhood picture book) imbued with Miyazaki’s trademark Natural themes and lovingly-rendered characters. The film is not an epic à la “Princess Mononoke” or “Nausicaä” nor a coming-of-age narrative like “Kiki’s Delivery Service” or “Spirited Away;” it’s not even quite a little Shinto prayer like “My Neighbor Totoro,” although it does share that work’s respect for the boundless energy of very young children and focus on the interaction between the natural and the supernatural. Rather, “Ponyo” is the story of a small romance of the kind that can be had only by children too innocent to know what romance is, and the story of the relationships between parents and children (the fact that the main character is based on the young Goro Miyazaki opens up a whole world of interesting interpretive angles that I won’t take here). I’ve seen a lot of great movies this year, but I don’t think that I enjoyed watching any of them more than I enjoyed watching “Ponyo.” Any film that can make me like kids, even temporarily, is a darn powerful artwork. It’s also a good Christmas movie since it’s about Incarnation, although there’s possibly a difference between the human incarnation of God and the human incarnation of a fish.
As ex-President, I formally request that the anime club go and see this wonderful, wondrous film when it makes it to Lagoon… in fact, that might be a good field trip to which to invite outsiders, although it *is* a children’s film. Sort of. A film about children. Whatever.”
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