The Melodies You Whistle Without Deciding To

Anime has been out of fashion for years, and I have never cared even slightly. Sailor Moon, Dragon Ball, Neon Genesis Evangelion—I was a devoted fan of all of it regardless of quality, regardless of dubbing, regardless of whether the animation budget looked like someone had spent it on lunch instead. Big eyes, magical transformations, talking stuffed animals as best friends. That was all it took. Those shows are half the reason I fell so deeply and unhealthily in love with Japan.

But Hayao Miyazaki was always something else entirely. His films feel like memories of places you’ve never been—that specific ache, fairy-tale and melancholy at once, pressing on some part of the brain you didn’t know had nerve endings. I saw Princess Mononoke in a cinema in Koblenz and sat there absorbing every breath of it. Becca and I had an entire theater to ourselves for Howl’s Moving Castle, which felt like the movie had been arranged specifically for us. And the melodies from Spirited Away still surface on their own—I’ll be halfway down a street and suddenly I’m whistling them without having decided to.

The next film from Studio Ghibli, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, reworks the little mermaid: a small fish-girl swims away from home and is found washed up on a beach by a five-year-old boy. The bones of the fairy tale are there, but in Miyazaki’s hands they become something that looks and breathes like nothing else. It was heading for American cinemas that August. I was already waiting.