Ponyo

Note: This is a very negative review, but my Dad, with whom I see a ton of movies where we see eye-to-eye quite often, is someone who loved this movie. So maybe I'm off my rocker. Or maybe I'm the only one peering behind the curtain to see the whole thing's a headache-inducing sham. Either way, two people saw this movie tonight and we both had wildly opposing reactions to it. So as always, take this with a big grain of cynical salt.

In the latest cinematic offering from the usually reliable Japanese filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki, Ponyo is a human-like "goldfish" (I use the term loosely, because I personally don't see a speck of goldfish DNA in the little thing) who briefly transforms into a creepy poultry-like creature before finally becoming a real, living, breathing girl. If this sounds like arbitrary silliness that requires animation to bring it all to life, then well, that's because it is. Ponyo is as ridiculously nonsensical a movie as it is a character. None of it adds up to anything more than a bit of goofy fun meant to distract kids.

Except that, for once in Miyazaki's quite amazing career, his movie isn't any fun at all. It's a flimsy piece of fluff with nowhere to go but down. The first few minutes introduce us to an underwater world teeming with animated marine life, each creature a wacky wonder bursting with the same visual imagination that so comfortably populates Miyazaki's past work. For a brief moment, Ponyo feels like something promising, another enjoyable little movie from a master storyteller in love with the possibilities of animation.

But then the plot kicks in and everything goes to narrative hell in an anime hand-basket. A little boy named Sosuke wanders down to the water that laps at the shore below his home on the cliff. During his routine visit to the ocean, he stumbles upon a "goldfish" (I'm still having troubles with that one) trapped in a bottle. He frees the fish, names it Ponyo, and heads home to show his mother. That all seems harmless enough, but it turns out that Sosuke is about to screw things up pretty royally, since Ponyo gets a taste for human delights such as ham and decides that being a human is way better than being a human-like goldfish.

This greatly angers Ponyo's father, a sea-dwelling guy who looks like a human but is actually some unexplained creature who once was human and... oh, it's not worth it. There's no explanation for what he is, which doesn't really matter, since his purpose is really just to release exposition and force Ponyo into a big, life-altering decision. Should Ponyo return to the sea or live out her life on land as a pink-haired person with a screechy voice? The answer is so obvious that a moronic manatee could write the ending, but that doesn't stop Miyazaki from dragging the story out so he can continue to show off his army of funny-looking fish.

To be fair, part of the problem with Ponyo falls in the hands of those dwelling on this side of the Pacific. The Walt Disney Company has a standing order for all Miyazaki movies of the feature-length variety, which means that each of the Japanese pictures are carted over here for distribution under the familiar Disney banner. Fearing that no one wants to see a kids movie with subtitles, the people behind Disney's distribution deal hire English-speaking actors to record a new dialogue track for the movie. This has worked well in the past (Disney's been doing this with Miyazaki movies for quite a while), but Ponyo's kids are an exception.

Sosuke and Ponyo are voiced by Frankie Jonas (the youngest of the super-popular Jonas Brothers) and Noah Cyrus (younger sister to superstar Miley), respectively. While I can understand the business plan behind the decision to cast these two voices, I have to admit that Jonas and Cyrus come equipped with squealing voices that operate like nails on a chalkboard. It doesn't help that they scream almost every one of their lines. I'm pretty sure I will have nightmares for the rest of my life in which Noah Cyrus screeches the word "ham!" on an endless loop in my ear.

Between Ponyo and July's maddening kiddie crap G-Force, I am beginning to feel like a nasty curmudgeon whining about how they don't make children's entertainment like they used to. But the most frustrating thing is that I consider Miyazaki to be one of the few cinematic storytellers who does have a genuine ability to spin family-friendly tales into heart-warming gold. His previous two features, the 2001 beauty Spirited Away and the 2004 marvel Howl's Moving Castle, are among the best kid's movies in the last decade.

I hope that Ponyo is merely a misstep in a rather brilliant career and not a sign of Miyazaki giving up or running out of creative gas. The filmmaker has not lost his sense of visual imagination, but the threadbare story feels like a carelessly discarded pile of uninteresting ideas. Ponyo is a movie worth watching if it comes with a mute button (the title song, performed by Frankie Jonas and Noah Cyrus and played over the end credits, is a terrifying aural assault), but it's not a movie that I can recommend with a clear conscience. Miyazaki's latest offers lots of goofy-looking marine creatures worthy of a chuckle, but it's really just a narrative whirlpool, spiralling out of control and into obscurity.