Word: ponyo
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While Hurricane Gustav was chewing up Cuba and storming toward Louisiana, the screen of the Venice Film Festival's Sala Grande was showing a very sweet tsunami. In the animated movie Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the swelling waves take the form of dolphins, and when a Japanese coastal village gets submerged no one is killed or hurt - just amusingly displaced. The rising up of the marine world is not insurrection against humanity but gently cautionary instruction for it. Treat the oceans with respect, the movie says, and they will provide you with food and wonder...
...That thesis might not be embraced by the tens of thousands swept away by the Indonesian tsunami, or the like number displaced by Katrina. But Ponyo, which the Disney Company will release in the States next year, is a parable for children, and they're entitled to the gift of hope. Besides, it's the genius of anime deity Hayao Miyazaki, the movie's writer-director, to create elemental images more wondrous than alarming - whether they're the forest demons of Princess Mononoke or the the bathhouse ghosts who transform the heroine's parents into pigs in Spirited Away...
...While computers are sometimes used - digital paint was employed in Princess Mononoke, for example - the essence if not the entirety of a Studio Ghibli film still consists of Miyazaki personally putting pen to paper. His latest fairytale, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, which grossed over $91 million in the first month of its Japan release, was done entirely by hand. The power of this as a means of differentiating Studio Ghibli's work from other animation houses cannot be overstated. Characters and story lines, too, are seemingly inimitable. "The Ghibli working style is possible because of Miyazaki," says...