The Animated Genius of Hayao Miyazaki!

[Ponyo is] a willful fish-child who escapes her human-hating magician father (Liam Neeson) and treks to land, where she bonds with Sosuke, a 5-year-old boy voiced by the Jonas Brothers’ younger sibling Frankie Jonas. A surfeit of wild magic activated in the wrong place and time turns Ponyo human and reunites her with Sosuke, while also returning the already lively ocean around Sosuke’s home to the Devonian age, with gigantic, ancient fish-ancestors sporting in the waves....

While the story is modeled on a traditional fairy tale and a traditional love story, it’s more primal than it looks. In keeping with Miyazaki’s usual motifs, Ponyo’s attachment to Sosuke is an unthinking force, as avid and single-minded as the decapitated forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, or the crazed, murderous Ohmu in Miyazaki’s Nausicaä Of The Valley Of The Wind. Miyazaki never lets viewers forget that Ponyo is human-shaped but not actually human; her shape shifts and dissolves back toward fish-dom whenever she exerts her magical powers. In this and other things, the story operates on a fluid dream-logic, or the storytelling logic of a very small child: Events melt into each other without urgency, and a simple act like making and drinking tea is treated with the same complacent, wondrous gravity as magic that calls wave-monsters into being. Even so, older kids and even adults are unlikely to get bored, thanks to the story’s unforced sweetness, giddy highs, and stunningly beautiful visuals. Even in the unspoiled Devonian, real life never looked this good.