The Goldfish Who Killed Ariel
The great white shark has been done to death. Nemo’s been found so many times he’s basically a commuter. And giant squid, despite their obvious qualifications, have still not assumed their rightful position as rulers of this planet. You could be forgiven for thinking the ocean had nothing left to offer.
Then there’s Studio Ghibli, which has spent decades proving that the sea—and forests, and skies, and all the spaces where strange things live—is still full of material if you look at it right. Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, Howl’s Moving Castle: their back catalogue reads like a list of films that showed me what animation was actually capable of. Not children’s entertainment in the diminishing sense. Films that happen to star children.
Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea—Hayao Miyazaki’s 2008 film—is about a goldfish girl with red hair who wants to be human, which is the oldest story in ocean mythology and the one Disney already ran into the ground with The Little Mermaid. Ponyo escapes her magician father with the help of her hundred sisters, washes up on shore, and is taken in by a small boy named Sōsuke and his mother. Father pursues. Ocean floods. Magic gets loose in the world in a way that feels genuinely dangerous and beautiful at the same time.
What separates this from the Disney version isn’t just craft—it’s the film’s attitude toward the sea itself. Miyazaki’s ocean is alive and indifferent and ancient. It doesn’t exist to provide a backdrop for love stories. The wave-fish that chase Sōsuke’s mother’s car through the flooding roads are one of the great images in contemporary animation: massive, translucent, prehistoric, moving with a slow intent that makes you understand the flood isn’t an accident. It’s the ocean reclaiming something.
The film runs on a dreamlike logic that either gets you or doesn’t. I got it completely. Something young and greedy woke up watching it—the part that wants the world to contain more impossible things than it does. Ponyo is a film for small children and for people who miss being small children, which covers most of us if we’re being honest.