Ponyo is an imaginative retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid. Set in a Japanese harbour town, the film follows the story of Sosuke, a five year-old who finds a mermaid while playing in the ocean. Ponyo quickly takes a liking to Sosuke, but her father doesn't want her to spend time with humans. He retrieves her and takes her back to his underwater house. Ponyo then decides that she would rather be with Sosuke, and returns back to the human world.
The artwork in the film is superb. In an age of pixel perfect Pixar productions, it's nice to see such high production quality out of a traditional hand-drawn animation film. The forces of nature are shown to dominate human culture. This is a common theme in Japanese art, an example of which is this iconic Ukiyo-e woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
In the film, a combination of the human's mistreatment of the sea, and Ponyo's ascension out of the ocean has put the natural world out of order. …
The artwork in the film is superb. In an age of pixel perfect Pixar productions, it's nice to see such high production quality out of a traditional hand-drawn animation film. The forces of nature are shown to dominate human culture. This is a common theme in Japanese art, an example of which is this iconic Ukiyo-e woodblock print, The Great Wave off Kanagawa.
In the film, a combination of the human's mistreatment of the sea, and Ponyo's ascension out of the ocean has put the natural world out of order. …