A Long and Unnecessary Ponyo Post

I appreciate Ponyo more than I used to. I mean, it is dorky, but not as bad as The Cat Returns, which also isn't that bad. Not everything can be Totoro, after all.

Some of that is just appreciating Lisa, Sosuke's mom, more. I endeavor to be the sort of parent that when your kid's goldfish turns into a magical girl in the middle of a typhoon would say "Life is mysterious and amazing, but we have work to do now, and I need you both to stay calm."

But aside from that, I have thoughts about the "mundane world" as portrayed in the film. It's very common for kids' media to have a mundane world and a magic world, in various ways, and then to have plausible deniability such that adults or at least non-protagonists can be unaware and/or dismissive of the magic world. And Ponyo appears to have this setup too: there's the magical ocean world and the mundane human world, and they're explicitly framed as needing to be kept separate. But I think it's more interesting/works better to think of it more akin to magical realism.

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