Trailer
Plot summary
Sōsuke is five years old and lives on a cliff above the sea with his mother Lisa, while his father Kōichi works aboard a ship. Ponyo is the daughter of Fujimoto, a wizard who was once human, and of the sea goddess Gran Mamare. During an outing in her father's submarine she slips away and drifts ashore inside a glass jar, where Sōsuke finds her. When he breaks the jar open with a rock he cuts his finger, and she heals the wound by licking it. He gives her the name Ponyo and says he will keep her safe. Fujimoto, believing she was kidnapped, calls on wave spirits to recover her. Ponyo rejects her birth name and declares she wants to be a human girl.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Ponyo (2008)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For Ponyo, Studio Ghibli closed its computer graphics section to keep the film hand-drawn, and Hayao Miyazaki wanted the ships drawn frame-by-frame rather than sliding a single cel across the frame as normal productions do.
- Stuck in pre-production, Miyazaki visited the Tate Britain, where John Everett Millais's 1852 painting Ophelia startled him so much that he decided Studio Ghibli's animation style "could not go on as before".
- Ponyo was the last Studio Ghibli film, and the last anime of any kind, to be released on VHS, and the first Studio Ghibli film to come out on Blu-ray, though several Ghibli documentaries had already appeared on the format through Disney Japan.
- Ponyo opened in 927 theatres in the U.S., by far the widest release ever for a Studio Ghibli film there, compared with 26 theatres for Spirited Away, 36 for Howl's Moving Castle and 38 for Princess Mononoke.
- Ponyo's birth name, Brunhilde, is a deliberate nod to Wagner's Brünnhilde, the eldest of the nine legendary Valkyrie in the opera Die Walküre, and the film's music also references Wagner's opera.
- Eight-year-old Nozomi Ōhashi, who sang the theme song "Gake no Ue no Ponyo" with the duo Fujioka Fujimaki, became the youngest participant in the 59th NHK Kōhaku Uta Gassen, beating Cute's Mai Hagiwara's record at age 11.
- Miyazaki based the character of Sōsuke on his own son, Gorō Miyazaki, when the boy was five years old.
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