Word: ponyo
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...exhibition of the most rapturous watercolors is currently on display at U.S. movie theaters. Ponyo, the latest film from anime master Hayao Miyazaki - Academy Award winner for his 2001 film, Spirited Away - begins deep in the sea near a Japanese coastal village, and the underwater vision is both subtle and spectacular. Instead of relying on the usual cartoon bubbles and wisecracking fish, Miyazaki waves a wand and establishes his location with a pastel palette, the gentle undulating of flora and anemones, and Joe Hisaishi's haunting score. You're treated, aurally and visually, to a subterranean symphony...
Fish out of WaterIn his native Japan, Miyazaki, 68, is perhaps the most respected director working in any film form. Still making movies in 2-D, hand-drawn animation, he creates a frame-by-frame storyboard - 180,000 drawings for Ponyo - that his crew of animators brings to life with minimal help from computers. He is also one of his country's biggest star names. His 1997 Princess Mononoke was Japan's all-time box-office winner until it was overtaken by Titanic; then in 2001, Spirited Away topped Titanic, and it remains the country's top grosser. Ponyo took...
...food bio-pic Julie & Julia, in fourth place; Katherine Heigl's The Ugly Truth, in eighth; and the she-loves-me-not rom-com (500) Days of Summer, in tenth. Kids could see G-Force (fifth), Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (seventh) and the Disney-released Ponyo (ninth). (Check out TIME's Time Traveler's Wife review...
...just one rowdy-guy movie aside from G.I. Joe, and it was a clunker. The used-car farce The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard fell hard, cadging just $5.5 million and instantly qualifying for an federal auto bailout. Of the other new releases, Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo, which had made $165 million in its native Japan, earned $3.5 million in the English-language version - which is not much, but is also not bad, considering the modest returns for Miyazaki's previous theatrical releases in North America (Princess Mononoke, $2.4 million; Spirited Away, $10 million; and Howl's Moving Castle...
...Ponyo, $3.5 million, first weekend...