A Long and Unnecessary Ponyo Post
Apr. 3rd, 2025 10:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kihouI 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.
That is to say, while there's enough ambiguity to interpret this in various ways, I think it's interesting to take the two worlds as not actually that separate, and Ponyo's mundane world as less of a magicless world and more of one where magical elements are uncommon but accepted. Unlike in Totoro (where only kids can see the fantastic elements and even if Mei and Satsuki's parents believe in Totoro they have a fair amount of plausible deniability) or Spirited Away (where the spirit world is very separate from mundane life and her parents are unaware of what happened and brush aside evidence that something's up), in Ponyo a lot of characters encounter the weird: the sailors on the ship, the town all getting in boats, the seniors and staff at the senior center. And while the adults are surprised, sure, they're not boggled or in denial the way they might be in other media. You could sorta assume that post-movie folks are going to rationalize it away, but I'm not sure the movie really supports that; even though the noise of helicopters create a more modern, technological feeling at the end of the movie, and Ponyo specifically has to give up her magic, the seniors have still been miraculously healed and there's no real indication that anyone else isn't going to remember the impossible moon or the Devonian sea creatures.
From more of a magical realism perspective, you know, maybe the consensus in the town is that this is a world where magical things happen. Not all the time, not in ways that are well understood, but you all know someone who had an encounter that couldn't be explained. I feel like this holds together pretty well: there's no masquerade, no hidden world, just a world that's mysterious and amazing.
Part of what's interesting to me about it is that I so strongly initially assumed not this, and I think a lot of it is related to the assumptions we make about technology. A Little Mermaid story with sailboats and horses, we might assume people on land believe in supernatural elements. (Or one more explicitly "cartoony".) But in one with cars and propane tanks and electricity? We make different assumptions.
But from another perspective that's pretty silly. There's a whole genre of Japanese folktales around trains, and it's not like people in real life don't believe all sorts of things. And one of the real-life asides in the Mushi-shi manga (which I just happened to be reading) describes someone the author knows, after a typhoon, seeing a line of fox ships with lanterns that seem a lot like the line of ships the sailors see here. Why shouldn't we have both technology and low-key magic awareness? (Pom Poko is an obvious comparison point.)
And that leads me into another point that I think is low-key trying to set this expectation: Lisa's driving. Lisa drives wildly, takes unnecessary risks, acts more like she should be helping Lupin III make a getaway than driving her kid to preschool. (Her car is not Lupin's Fiat 500, but it's also not unlike his Fiat 500…) It feels a bit forced or unrealistically adding drama, considered from a purely realistic mundane lens. But it does sort of work from a larger-than-life/tall tales lens, which I think holds together how explicitly supernatural elements are treated later.
And I guess probably the other way to frame it is, maybe it's magical realism the way real life is for kids. In Totoro, things work from a kids perspective for the kids and from an adult perspective for the adults, but here everything is as exciting and magical as it might be for a kid Sosuke's age, and the film doesn't feel the need to put that down or paint that as something incompatible with adults. And I dunno, I just think that's neat.
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.
That is to say, while there's enough ambiguity to interpret this in various ways, I think it's interesting to take the two worlds as not actually that separate, and Ponyo's mundane world as less of a magicless world and more of one where magical elements are uncommon but accepted. Unlike in Totoro (where only kids can see the fantastic elements and even if Mei and Satsuki's parents believe in Totoro they have a fair amount of plausible deniability) or Spirited Away (where the spirit world is very separate from mundane life and her parents are unaware of what happened and brush aside evidence that something's up), in Ponyo a lot of characters encounter the weird: the sailors on the ship, the town all getting in boats, the seniors and staff at the senior center. And while the adults are surprised, sure, they're not boggled or in denial the way they might be in other media. You could sorta assume that post-movie folks are going to rationalize it away, but I'm not sure the movie really supports that; even though the noise of helicopters create a more modern, technological feeling at the end of the movie, and Ponyo specifically has to give up her magic, the seniors have still been miraculously healed and there's no real indication that anyone else isn't going to remember the impossible moon or the Devonian sea creatures.
From more of a magical realism perspective, you know, maybe the consensus in the town is that this is a world where magical things happen. Not all the time, not in ways that are well understood, but you all know someone who had an encounter that couldn't be explained. I feel like this holds together pretty well: there's no masquerade, no hidden world, just a world that's mysterious and amazing.
Part of what's interesting to me about it is that I so strongly initially assumed not this, and I think a lot of it is related to the assumptions we make about technology. A Little Mermaid story with sailboats and horses, we might assume people on land believe in supernatural elements. (Or one more explicitly "cartoony".) But in one with cars and propane tanks and electricity? We make different assumptions.
But from another perspective that's pretty silly. There's a whole genre of Japanese folktales around trains, and it's not like people in real life don't believe all sorts of things. And one of the real-life asides in the Mushi-shi manga (which I just happened to be reading) describes someone the author knows, after a typhoon, seeing a line of fox ships with lanterns that seem a lot like the line of ships the sailors see here. Why shouldn't we have both technology and low-key magic awareness? (Pom Poko is an obvious comparison point.)
And that leads me into another point that I think is low-key trying to set this expectation: Lisa's driving. Lisa drives wildly, takes unnecessary risks, acts more like she should be helping Lupin III make a getaway than driving her kid to preschool. (Her car is not Lupin's Fiat 500, but it's also not unlike his Fiat 500…) It feels a bit forced or unrealistically adding drama, considered from a purely realistic mundane lens. But it does sort of work from a larger-than-life/tall tales lens, which I think holds together how explicitly supernatural elements are treated later.
And I guess probably the other way to frame it is, maybe it's magical realism the way real life is for kids. In Totoro, things work from a kids perspective for the kids and from an adult perspective for the adults, but here everything is as exciting and magical as it might be for a kid Sosuke's age, and the film doesn't feel the need to put that down or paint that as something incompatible with adults. And I dunno, I just think that's neat.
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Date: 2025-04-04 03:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-04-04 06:24 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-05-23 12:56 pm (UTC)Also, "that's just what it's like to live in a small town by the sea" works very well as a vibe and reminds me a bit of some of the fun bits in Chuubo's. "This is a very ordinary, humble town. Of course there are talking rats running around on the roofs and occasionally a ship drags in a kaiju that everyone eats for weeks."