Word: sea
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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...
...Ponyo, a little fish who wants to become a little girl. In this very loose retelling of The Little Mermaid - really, a dream triggered by a distant memory of the Hans Christian Andersen tale - we see her and her dozens of sisters navigating Miyazaki's notion of the sea. The director doesn't bother much with the usual cartoon bubbles; he trusts the blue-green palette, the gentle undulating of the creatures and the haunting buoyancy of Jo Hisaishi's score to establish the location with the waves of a watery wand. One little adventuress, known...
...film's many wonderful vignettes, she enjoys her first sip of honeyed tea. Ponyo is accepted into the household by Sosuke's mother Lisa (Tomoko Yamaguchi), who works in a Senior Center; the boy's father, Koichi (Kazushige Nagashima), is a fisherman whose job keeps him at sea for nights on end. Absent parents, absent children: the theme of Ponyo...
...news of a four-year-old running, let alone swimming, away from home would upset any parent. But Ponyo's dad, Fujimoto (George Tokoro), isn't just any parent. He's the king of the sea, at least in these parts, and quite the dude. With his gaunt face, form-fitting red-and-white-striped jacket, flowing seaweed hair and a perpetually haggard look, he suggests an underwater rock star; he could be the Ron Wood of the deep. Fujimoto calls himself an "ex-human" (apparently he's undergone a sea-change operation) and has the imperious zeal...
...raising two kids (one of them part-piscine) while her husband's away; but for long stretches, when Koichi's life is imperiled by the storm, the movie forgets about him - perhaps because he's doing a bit of illegal whaling. Fujimoto's wife, Gran Mamare, is a magnificent sea goddess, with the perfect posture and forehead jewel of a Bollywood queen, but she doesn't show up till late in the film. Miyazaki also creates a tsunami that, however fantastical and benign he portrays it, can't help recall the fatal force of nature. By American animation standards, these...