Ponyo and the Sea

Stunning visuals and imaginative narrative make Ponyo and the Sea a must-see.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo and the Sea is a beautiful retelling of The Little Mermaid, following Ponyo, an adorable yet rebellious fish-girl who undermines her wizard-father’s authority and swims ashore in order to explore the world above. Ponyo quite accidentally gets caught in a glass bottle at sea and gets carried to a shore near the cliff where Sosuke lives. Sosuke finds Ponyo (in the form of a goldfish) and puts her in a bucket, and the two children spend a day together before Fujimoto, Ponyo’s father, forces Ponyo to go back to the sea. But Ponyo wants to see Sosuke again, and so she fantastically escapes from his father’s lair, visually bursting out of her marine home.

When Ponyo and Sosuke reunite this time, Ponyo has grown legs, and turned into an exuberant little girl. The two characters come to share their mutual experiences, and grow to love one another. Unbeknownst to the pair however, Ponyo’s escape from her father’s lair triggers an imbalance in the ecosystem, causing a gigantic tsunami to hit Sosuke’s town. In the final act, the purity of their love is tested, and it is up to them to find Sosuke’s mother, and restore the balance of the ecosystem together.

Miyazaki’s animation is as impressive as ever, though perhaps in a sparser style than his past films—having a child-like quality and simple brilliance to them. His bright colors, and the constant ebb and flow of natural forces (wind and water) give wonderful imagery to the film. In Ponyo, waves upon waves of fantastical giant fish splash into the frame, vibrant and pastel sea creatures swim through the sea, and godlike spirits illuminate the screen in gold. The expressions of each character are so vivid—joy, sadness, tenderness, and love all come across these characters. Every detail—from the furrow of their brows, or puffing of cheeks, or swelling in their bodies—contributes to the audience sense of heightened emotion in the visual language. The buoyant movements of jellyfish to the lurking movements of the Fujimoto’s sea monsters all add to Miyazaki’s imaginative visuals. There is movement in every fiber of the film.

Miyazaki’s film successfully brings out the theme of the power of a child’s innocence, and highlights the greater societal problems of environmental preservation. His children are courageous, pure of heart, and worthy of admiration. Ponyo and Sosuke venture out into the flood using their toy boat; they work together and neither ever leaves the other one behind. In the end, their bond, their love, prevents Ponyo from being turned into sea foam. Their love is tested, and deemed worthy.

Environmental preservation is a consistent theme throughout the movie. Fujimoto, a human sorcerer is deemed the preserver of the sea—an interesting metaphor, that a human’s responsibility is to his environment and keeping the “balance” of it. Ponyo makes her first dire appearance stuck in a glass jar that had been tossed carelessly into the sea. The power of nature also comes to a crescendo at the end in the terrific storm.

If the visuals and story aren’t enough, the characters of this film are just so darn cute and adorable! You can’t help but feel the insane urge to pinch and squeeze them. Just seeing the animated reactions of the children in the film is entertaining in itself, but Miyazaki takes it to a whole other level in that he really makes us see the beauty of the world through the eyes of a child. We find ourselves delighting in the simple pleasures and facing the tests of life with an innocent, optimistic courage. Miyazaki’s magical Ponyo and the Sea engages the audience in a film that is bursting through the seams with stunning visuals.

Sleepless in Seattle Movie Blog

The romance in Sleepless in Seattle was brought out through the various camera techniques—editing, music, mood—employed in the film. The unification between content and form helped to exploit the central romantic theme. As seen from the re-cut trailer, Sleepless in Seattle, can very easily be seen as a stalker-oriented horror film. However, in the actual film, even though neither character meet the other until the very end, their chemistry and romance is instantly believable to the audience. Why is this the case?



In the beginning our two protagonists are separated by distance, so how do we get the sense that Annie and Sam are intimate with one another? This is accomplished throughout the film in several ways. The first is through the visuals of the film. They are constantly put into parallel spaces. When Sam is in his house talking on the radio, Annie is sitting in her home listening to him. When Annie is coming out of a door, Sam is coming out of another door. When Sam is walking by the sea, Annie is also walking alone somewhere and gazing at the stars. Not only do the their eye-lines and colors of these parallel shots match, but so too does the mood of each separate scene. Even though the two are separated by a long physical distance from Seattle to Baltimore, they are enclosed by the same emotional space. The parallelism in their setting seems to defy the physical space that separates them.



Sound is also extremely effective in portraying the intimacy between our two protagonists. The overarching romantic music theme sets a mood that transcends two different spaces, in order to create the same mood from both. Also the first “meeting” between Annie and Sam is through sound—they are connected through the radio. The scene displays Sam talking into the phone while Annie drives in her car listening to the radio. What is interesting about this scene is that there is a lack of ambient sound—the only things we hear in this section are the words spoken by Sam, and Annie’s reaction to them. The super close ups that are utilized in this section create emotional connection and intimacy between the two—as if Sam were directly talking to Annie. There is only a break in reverie when a sound of a car interrupts the scene.
The success of Annie and Sam’s meeting is also set up through the presence of a movie. There is this constant allusion to An Affair to Remember, and the people around them are always emotionally impacted by this movie. Everyone from Annie’s best friend, Sam’s sister, and even the bell hopper in the concluding scene is aware of the movie. The film seems to play with the classic vs. modern idea of a love story-paralleling the two stories yet contrasting them.



Sleepless in Seattle is not quite your average classic Hollywood film in several ways. The first is that there is no dual storyline (a trait common to classics according to Bordwell)—the entire film focuses on the romance between Annie and Sam—there is no introduction of a greater meaning in the movie, there is no quest that either character goes through aside from finding each other. Arguably however, it is possible that Sam’s quest is to recover from family tragedy, or raising his son, Jonah. However, in the movie, Jonah seems to be much more of an adult in the family, guiding his father through trauma rather than the other way around.
In addition, the visual effects employed in the film don’t quite follow traditional conventions. Spatial continuity is broken frequently in order to convey closeness between our two protagonists. The progression of the storyline does not adhere to the classical Hollywood film either. While most films start with a “cute meet” between two characters who then develop intimacy after a number of obstacles or misfortunes, Sleepless in Seattle ENDS with the first meeting. We, as the audience, however are conditioned to think that they have the perfect ending, when it is really the beginning.