Created by celebrated director Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli, Ponyo is clearly not one of their better efforts. In this story, an aquatic, human-headed blob that we’re told is supposed to be a goldfish escapes from her human-looking wizard/alchemist father. After riding on a jellyfish for a while, she has a dangerous encounter with a trawler, gets stuck in a jar, and washes up on shore, where she is found and rescued by Sôsuke, a five-year-old boy who lives with his mother while his sea captain father is mostly away. He names her Ponyo. In the process of breaking her out of the jar, Sôsuke cuts his finger. Ponyo licks it and instantly heals it. More importantly, the taste of human blood gives her magical powers. Ponyo and Sôsuke form a bond, and she decides she wants to become a human girl.

Ponyo and Her Father. IMDb.com

Ponyo’s father is having none of it, however, so he sends his magical water spirits to reclaim her. During a heated quarrel, she starts to transform, but her father uses magic to force her back into her original state. He leaves to summon Ponyo’s mother, and while he’s gone, she completes her transformation, gets into the storehouse of magical elixir, and unleashes a watery apocalypse upon the unsuspecting humans.

Ponyo Wreaks Havoc. IMDb.com

And if that setup seems weird, the rest of the film makes even less sense. For the most part, Ponyo is 101 minutes of random, vaguely connected events. Don’t try to apply any kind of logic to this one. Stuff just happens. It’s as if Miyazaki did one of those stream of consciousness exercises and decided to turn the result into a script.

Among the most glaringly bizarre elements: Ponyo’s father says he was human once, and still appears as an odd-looking man, but mating with a beautiful humanoid sea-goddess somehow produced a litter of human-headed aquatic blobs. At the start of the film, Ponyo’s father goes on an eco-rant about humans polluting the ocean and plots to eradicate them entirely, but this just goes away and, for no apparent reason, he’s cool with humans by the end of the film. The fate of the earth itself hinges on Sôsuke and Ponyo passing a much hyped “test of love” which turns out to be disappointingly anticlimactic.

Ponyo’s Mother. IMDb.com

Ponyo and Her Sisters. IMDb.com

Ok, so it made no sense, but how did it look? Did it at least have the Miyazaki/Studio Ghibli sense of wonder and magic? Sadly, not really. I’m a big fan of hand-drawn animation, and a tremendous amount of effort clearly went into Ponyo, but it fell flat. Maybe they tried too hard. Much of it was certainly pretty, but it just wasn’t wondrous.

Hayao Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli have solid track records for doing amazing work, but, unfortunately, Ponyo is an uncharacteristic misfire for them.

Overall rating: 5/10

This was the first film presented as part of Studio Ghibli Fest 2018, a partnership of Fathom Events and GKIDS.