Tagline: Welcome to a world where anything is possible.
Acclaimed anime master Hayao Miyazaki returns for his ninth animated feature with “Ponyo,” which deals with a friendship between a five-year-old boy and a goldfish princess that yearns to be human.
Brunhilde is a fish-girl who lives with her father Fujimoto, a once-human wizard or scientist who now lives underwater, and her numerous smaller sisters. One day, while she and her siblings are on an outing with their father in his four-flippered submarine, Brunhilde sneaks off and floats away on the back of a jellyfish. After an encounter with a fishing trawler (the net of which is scraping the trash-strewn bottom of the harbor), she ends up stuck in a bottle. She drifts to the shore of a small fishing town and is found and rescued by a small boy named Sōsuke.
Splitting the bottle open, Sōsuke cuts his finger in the process. Brunhilde licks his wound when he picks her up, and the wound heals almost instantly. After taking a great liking to her, Sōsuke renames her Ponyo and promises to protect her forever. Meanwhile, a distraught Fujimoto is searching frantically for his daughter. Because of his own bad memories of the human world, he believes that Sōsuke has kidnapped her, and he calls his wave spirits to recover her. After the wave spirits take Ponyo away, Sōsuke is heartbroken and goes home with his mother, Lisa, who tries to cheer him up, to no avail.
Ponyo and Fujimoto have an argument, during which Ponyo refuses to let her father call her by her birth-name, “Brunhilde”. She declares her name to be Ponyo and voices her desire to become human, because she has started to fall in love with Sōsuke. Suddenly she starts to grow legs and turn into a human, a power granted to her by the human blood she ingested when she licked Sōsuke’s finger. Her father turns her back with difficulty and goes to summon Ponyo’s mother, Granmamare. Meanwhile, Ponyo, with the help of her sisters, breaks away from her father and uses his magic to make herself fully human. The huge amount of magic that she inadvertently releases into the ocean causes an imbalance in the world, resulting in a huge tsunami.
Read the Full Production Notes
Ponyo
Starring: Cate Blanchett, Noah Cyrus, Matt Damon, Tina Fey, Frankie Jonas, Cloris Leachman, Liam Neeson, Lily Tomlin, Betty White
Directed by: Hayao Miyazaki
Screenplay by: Hayao Miyazaki, Melissa Mathison
Release Date: August 14, 2009
MPAA Rating: G for general audience.
Studio: Walt Disney Pictures
Box Office Totals
Domestic: $15,090,399 (7.6%)
Foreign: $184,369,914 (92.4%)
Total: $199,460,313 (Worldwide)