Miyazaki’s Little Mermaid: A Goldfish Out of Water
deborah ross
Two Animators and the Problem
of Animation
when hayao miyazaki’s spirited away
reached American theaters in 2002, children by
and large were enthralled, but some of us adults
were confused. This English-language version of
the original Japanese film bore the Disney logo,
but it was clearly not Disney. It was longer, for
one thing, with odd pauses during which the
characters seemed to be pondering,1 and the
line between good and evil seemed blurred and
shifting. On the other hand, it also did not fit the
American stereotype of Japanese animation—too
detailed, too expensive, and with a surprising
absence of exploding robots. One thing about
this movie did strike a familiar note: like many
Disney features, it presented imagination as a
sometimes dark and dangerous thing.
That imagination is both a gift and a curse
is hardly a new idea; its double-edged pres-
ence in children’s literature has long attracted
scholarly attention. But for an animated film
to warn viewers of the hazards of something
without which it could not begin to exist seems
downright hypocritical. When the most creative,
surrealistic animated images are made to serve
deborah ross is a professor of English at
Hawai‘i Pacific University. She has written on
power and gender in literary and film narratives
ranging from the eighteenth-century novel to Dis-
ney animated features and soap operas. For more
information, visit http://www.hpu.edu/CHSS/
English/Faculty/EFRoss.html.
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a story that preaches reason and restraint, they
seem almost to erase themselves, like the path
through Tulgey Wood rubbed out by broom
dogs in Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (1951).
Disney publicity has never officially acknowl-
edged any ambivalence about its chief product;
what would a commercial for a Disney movie or
theme park be without the word “imagination”
or its near relative, “dream”? Yet even the post-
Walt animated films of the neoclassic period,
which began in 1989 with The Little Mermaid,
may convey, in the tension between their pic-
tures and their plots, a deep sense of unease.2
Miyazaki, on the other hand, has been open
and straightforward about his misgivings about
the fantasy trade. “No matter how much we
pride ourselves in being conscientious,” he
remarked in 1987, “whatever experiences we
provide for [children] are in a sense stealing
time from them that otherwise might be spent
in a world where they go out and make their
own discoveries or have their own personal
experiences” (84). Whereas Walt Disney’s dis-
trust of his own medium arose from his growing
­conservatism—his biographies reveal a man
who sought an ever tighter hold on his staff
and, as many believe, on the subconscious
of his young audiences3—Miyazaki’s unease
arises from an opposite ideological tendency.
Instead of wishing for more discipline and
control, he has spoken of the need to liberate
both his team and the “overmanaged, overpro-
tected, suffocated” (251) children they serve.
Although he differs so markedly from Disney
in both his politics and the directness of his
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 commentary, Miyazaki does share his American
predecessor’s awareness that he is working
with dangerous magic—and therefore, there
may well be a sense in which his films also, like
Disney’s, are observably conflicted.
The release of the English-language version
of Ponyo in 2009 has provided a convenient
opportunity to test this hypothesis because we
now have Miyazaki’s own interpretation of Hans
Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” to
compare to Disney’s in search of similar signs
of strain. Not surprisingly, given his conscious
recognition of the problem, Miyazaki has been
more successful in working through it—in ex-
ploring with his audiences how imagination can
best be integrated into a fulfilling life away from
the screen. The sections that follow contrast
the plotlines and the imagery of these two films
in order to illuminate the ways in which each
deals with, or evades, this essential challenge
of the animator’s art.
Beyond the Binaries
First, however, some words of caution. West-
ern audiences have been all too ready to use
Disney as a reference point when discussing
Japanese animation in general (Napier 6) and
Miyazaki in particular. When anime first started
to catch on with young people in the West in
the 1980s, their elders expressed their bewil-
derment through such comparisons, as Luca
Raffaelli observes, because they were unable to
appreciate the distinctive artistry of Japanese
manga-derived films on their own terms (Raffa-
elli 130). Then began more enlightened discus-
sions acknowledging the artistic traditions be-
hind anime; but these conversations too have
sometimes led to distortion and stereotyping,
with Miyazaki and Disney used to make argu-
ments about the ways in which East is East and
West is West (Lamarre 336).
Their relationship is more complicated than
such arguments suggest. Disney and Miyazaki
are not discrete, parallel figures, since anima-
tion everywhere, including Japan (Raffaelli 127),
grew up under Disney’s powerful influence. In-
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fluence, of course, in the famous words of Har-
old Bloom, is generally attended with anxiety.
The astonishing technical achievement of a film
such as the 1937 Snow White cast a long and
chilling shadow over those churning out cartoon
series for Japanese television in the 1960s with
very low budgets and very little time (Miyazaki
124). Not surprisingly, there was some rebellion
against this (now absent) father figure who was
also a metonym for Western imperialism—some
desire to make Japanese anime a “site of im-
plicit cultural resistance” to American hegemony
(Napier 9)—which, Susan Napier argues, ironi-
cally led to its eventual popularity with American
audiences who felt surfeited with Hollywood
kitsch (10–11). Thus, the simpler—or cruder
and flatter—style of Japanese anime could be
claimed to be a deliberate effort to establish an
independent cultural identity. Miyazaki himself
once said he “hated” Disney movies for show-
ing “contempt for the audience” by making “the
barrier to both the entry and the exit . . . too low
and too wide” (72). Nevertheless, no animator
of his generation could go on without taking
something from Disney, and Miyazaki praised
early Disney films both for their creative use of
point of view (as in the flying scene in 1953’s
Peter Pan [44]) and for their depiction of nature
in motion (as in The Old Mill in 1937, a clear in-
fluence on Ponyo [124]).
One must also beware of oversimplifying
Miyazaki’s relationship to his own cultural tra-
ditions: this is, after all, a man who “loathes”
The Tale of Genji (358). He has acknowledged
links between manga and scroll art of the Heian
period and has talked about an inherently Japa-
nese tendency to visualize stories and people
in lines rather than in shaded forms as West-
erners do (Miyazaki 95–96). However, he has
also expressed amusement with the foreign
journalists who eagerly jump on these connec-
tions (96) and has criticized pretentious Japa-
nese animators who encourage critics (perhaps
including Raffaelli [129]) to extol “limited ani-
mation” as essentially Eastern, minimalist art
rather than what it often was: an unfortunate
inability to draw movement (Miyazaki 76–77).
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 For these reasons, any comparison between
Disney’s and Miyazaki’s Little Mermaids must
carefully avoid simplistic cultural binaries.
Another caution to be observed before theo-
rizing the existence of something called West-
ern realism as distinct from Japanese minimal-
ism is close consideration of what realism in an
animated film may mean. At its most naïve, it
may mean copying reality directly, as Disney in-
structed his staff to do, by studying live models
and live action film and by even drawing over
these, as in the Rotoscoped Cinderella (1950).
Yet the effect of these techniques is often far
from realistic.4 More crucial than literal mimesis
is internal consistency—the illusion of a fully
functioning alternative world. This sort of real-
ism may be assisted by the technical gadgets
Disney was famous for developing, such as the
multiplane camera and sophisticated sound
recording, and more recently, computer en-
hancements that create subtle lighting effects
and help blend animated foregrounds smoothly
into static backgrounds. Even hand drawing
can be more rather than less internally realistic:
shaded and richly paletted to suggest depth,
and fully animated (twelve drawings per sec-
ond) to suggest fluidity of movement (Lamarre
335).5 Yet this realism too can be ineffective,
even obstructive, in stories about human be-
ings. Psychological realism, for example, may
require caricature rather than detail and finish,
as Disney himself—without a tradition of manga
or scroll art to draw upon—sometimes advised
his staff.6 And perhaps the most important real-
ism of all to Miyazaki and Disney, in different
ways, might be called moral: that is, showing
that human actions have consequences.
In the following comparison of Disney’s and
Miyazaki’s versions of “The Little Mermaid,”
it is important to note the various kinds of
realistic constraint their stories impose on the
surrealistic images, for these constraints subtly
instruct viewers on the uses of imagination. In
both films, this accommodation is conceived in
terms of the connection between two worlds:
the sea, symbolizing magic and childhood, and
the land, representing reality and adulthood.
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From Andersen to Disney
The symbolism of the two worlds derives from
Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mer-
maid,” and it is one of the few features shared
by all three versions of the tale. Andersen is
remarkably evenhanded in his descriptions of
sea and land. In the beginning, he narrates the
exotic beauty of the sea to an audience of (pre-
sumably) human children, describing in detail
the gothic splendor of the castle, its amber
windows into which fish swim to eat out of the
mermaids’ hands, and the beautiful flowers
and fruit in its gardens, everything animated
by the constant movement of the water. But
when the point of view shifts to the mermaids,
who cannot wait to see the land as a special
treat on their fifteenth birthdays, our familiar
world becomes the magical and exotic one.
Now we are asked to imagine how amazing a
dog would seem to someone who has never
seen one; to see the beauty rather than the
deadliness of icebergs; to be estranged from
our familiar world, reawakened to the wonders
of the familiar; to recognize that ordinary and
extraordinary can change places with a change
of the gaze. Only then can we, Andersen’s lis-
teners, fully understand his heroine’s desire to
enter our world.
Andersen’s mermaid falls in love with her
young prince at first sight on her birthday while
watching his own birthday celebration aboard
his ship. When a storm comes up, she rescues
him, though he does not see her; instead, he
falls in love with a young girl from a convent
who is the first person he sees upon regaining
consciousness. In order to win the prince’s
love, the little mermaid lets the sea witch cut
out her tongue—thus permanently giving up her
voice—in payment for human legs, which cut
her and bleed with every step, while she hides
her pain with a smile. This alone may explain
why parents are more comfortable setting their
daughters down in front of the Disney video
than they are reading them this gruesome
story. Granted, some commentators, such as
Roberta Trites, have seen feminism rather than
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 masochism in the self-sacrifice of Andersen’s
mermaid, since she suffers to gain not only a
husband but also a soul (145); mermaids nor-
mally live for only three hundred years and then
turn into sea foam. Still, it rankles that the path
to eternal life should require finding a man and
keeping quiet: no singing (or “jouissance”),
no crying out in pain.7 The fact that there is an-
other path to immortality arises only in the end,
when the mermaid fails to win the prince’s love
and refuses her sisters’ offer of a magic sword
she could use to kill him in order to return to
her former state. Then, perhaps uncomfortable
at leaving his tragic heroine without any reward
for her so-called virtue, Andersen grants her a
loophole. She may yet win a soul if she contin-
ues to “suffer and endure” (Andersen), unself-
ishly helping others, for the rest of her three
hundred years. And we, the audience, may
help her, for the acts of “good” little children
shorten her “probation,” and the acts of “bad”
children lengthen it (Andersen). A child might
well be baffled and frustrated by such an end-
ing (as I was) and ask, “What’s the point? What
am I supposed to do?” And of course there is
no answer because Andersen believed there
was nothing you could do.8
Both Disney and Miyazaki spare their mer-
maids this torture, probably reasoning that
their audiences would be neither much helped
nor entertained by so tragic a view of romantic
love. Miyazaki, as discussed later in this article,
departed even more radically from Andersen
by making his “mermaid” a goldfish who turns
into a five-year-old human, so that the kind of
love his film explores is essentially nonsexual.
Disney’s film, however, stays with the teenage
theme and follows the story so closely that
the changes stand out—especially, perhaps,
the complete removal of pain. As several com-
mentators have noted, if Andersen’s smiling
martyr is not the most progressive role model,
neither is a girl who just swirls around a few
times and, voilà, has legs. This is also a form of
conservative propaganda, an advertisement for
traditional marriage and family values.9 There
is no mutilation; nothing is cut out. The voice
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is stored in a shell, to be redeemed if she suc-
ceeds with the prince. She does not sacrifice,
in other words; she gambles. And since this is
Disney, ultimately, she wins.
True, Ariel does not manage quite to have
it all: apparently, you cannot have both legs
and a tail. But she shows no sign of buyer’s
remorse (though the sea does call to her still in
the video sequel, The Little Mermaid II ) as she
single-mindedly pursues her dream of becom-
ing “part of our world” throughout the movie.
For this American heroine of the me-decade,
what matters is not what one chooses, but
having a choice: legs or tail, land or sea—it
might just as well be Coke or Pepsi. Thus, she
casually repudiates not only her own child-
hood but also her mythical heritage. Mermaids
have long served as “liminal” figures (White
185–86), “embody[ing] hybridity” (Williams
194) and thus enabling discussion of difficult
passages—into a dominant foreign culture
for marginalized minorities (Sells 177–78) or
simply into adulthood for adolescent girls (Wil-
liams 194–96). For Ariel’s creators, it appears,
the slow and dramatic processes mermaids
seem to have evolved to symbolize held not
the slightest interest.
Just as the film moves Ariel quickly and
painlessly from one species to the other, it
delineates sharply between the world of her
origin and that of her destination. We are in
the sea, and then we are on land, and on the
rare occasions when we do see these locales in
relation to each other—for example, when Ariel
ventures out on a rowboat or a ship—her former
home stays firmly in its place: below.10 Both
worlds are rendered in typical “realist” Disney
style, with much color and shading in the draw-
ing, much full animation to show gradations of
movement, and technically enhanced blend-
ing of foregrounds into backgrounds. But we
must ask, in a movie about choice: which is
“better”? The plot, in support of Ariel’s desire—­
expressed in her pseudo-feminist anthem,
“Part of Your World”—is a vote for the land. The
visuals, however, rather support the contention
of Sebastian the crab that “it’s better down
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 where it’s wetter.” Whereas the land is lifeless
and static, the sea is magical. That is, it more
fully exploits the surrealistic power of anima-
tion to transform objects and endow them,
unexpectedly, with life and with consciousness.
Consider, for example, the famous “Under
the Sea” production number as it contrasts
with its land counterpart, “Les Poissons.”
The first song, led by Sebastian, is a polemic
intended to convince Ariel to stay in her own
world, and the visuals and lyrics work together
to support his position. Here she can stroke
objects that look like plants, and they emerge
as sea horses; all the fish can sing and play
instruments, which themselves look oddly sen-
tient. Of special concern to Sebastian is the fact
that on land, fish are either pets or dinner.
In “Les Poissons,” which takes place in the
kitchen of Eric’s castle, we see what Sebastian
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meant: all the fish here are elaborately dead—
no longer animated themselves, but passive
recipients of gruesomely imaginative culinary
torture, which we witness through the eyes of
the horrified Sebastian. And here not only the
fish are lifeless. The line “life is de bubbles” in
Sebastian’s song is literally true under the sea,
where bubbles dance along with the characters’
movements. There, too, smoke can form itself
into hands and entwine Ariel to effect her trans-
formation. On land, the bubbles in Ariel’s bath
do nothing unless she blows them around, and
when she tries to breathe movement into ordi-
nary, unmagical smoke from a human pipe, she
covers her host in soot.
Ironically, to Ariel this dead place represents
freedom of movement, as she imagines how
legs will allow her to run (away from her father)
and do what married people do. And since
Figure 1: “Under the
Sea” production
number from The
Little Mermaid.
Figure 2: From The
Little Mermaid: “Les
Poissons,” being
prepared by Prince
Eric’s chef.
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 she is never disillusioned by what she finds
on land, we can only conclude that what she
really wants is not the freedom she claims, but
the opposite: a nice husband and a big, pretty
house that stands still against wind and wave.
The world under the sea, where anything can
happen, must have been great fun for the ani-
mators and background artists to create, and in
this place they must have been permitted some
freedom from the iron conceptions of the direc-
tor’s storyboards. Yet the story forces a nega-
tive judgment on this initially appealing world
by gradually associating its magic with the evil
witch, Ursula—queen animator, if you will, in
charge of transformation. Only the fear of this
evil can make the relatively boring, unrespon-
sive world of the land attractive to the viewer.
And thus is the power of imagination, ostensi-
bly celebrated here, effectually discredited.
Ponyo: The Story
Miyazaki’s “Little Mermaid,” like Disney’s,
reveals the director’s uneasiness about his art
and, by extension, about imagination. Unlike
Disney’s, however, his film does not simply say
one thing and show another. Rather, it uses
the possibilities of animation to explore the
way imagination should be used—that is, to
address the essential problem of growing up.
In this endeavor the story and the images work
together and support each other.
Ponyo’s tale, like Ariel’s, is about choice.
Here too the sea represents magic and child-
hood; in Miyazaki’s own words, it is “a world
where magic and alchemy are accepted as part
of the ordinary” (The Art of Ponyo 11), and the
heroine is warned that this is not so in the land
of the humans where she wishes to live (254).
But instead of Ariel’s instantaneous change,
Ponyo’s transformation is incremental, so that
the state of in-betweenness that mermaids
traditionally symbolize can once again be the
focus of attention. Here, process is everything.
And just as a human embryo passes through
the earlier stages of Homo sapiens, and just as
all our adult personalities still contain our child
selves, Ponyo never forgets what she used to
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be. The happy ending cannot come about, in
fact, until her true love, Sosuke, has promised
Ponyo’s parents to love and accept the fish that
still lives in her.
Ponyo has a lot more transforming to do
than Ariel, of course, because in the begin-
ning Ponyo is entirely, to all appearances, a
goldfish—though she also does not have as
far to go, since she ends as a five-year-old girl.
Her evolution is made possible by a number of
factors. It begins when, like the Andersen and
Disney heroines, she swims to the surface out
of curiosity and glimpses the love of her life.
Caught up in the garbage dumped by humans
onto the ocean floor, she is imprisoned in a
glass jar and rescued by Sosuke, who cuts his
finger in the process. She leaps up to lick it and
heal him, with magic she presumably inherited
from her humanoid goddess mother, Gran Ma-
mare. And thus their love begins, defined not
as eros in this case but as mutual nurturing and
protection. It is Sosuke who gives her the name
Ponyo, and as she learns to recognize herself
by this name, she slowly develops a face and a
human voice, in order to say out loud, “Ponyo
loves Sosuke.” When her father, the formerly
human sorcerer Fujimoto, recaptures her, she
rebels, willing herself to develop arms and
legs—again employing maternally inherited
powers—and escapes, making a hole in the
undersea laboratory that allows Fujimoto’s
elixir of life to leak out and the sea to rush in.
The result is a tsunami; the sea overwhelms the
land and throws off the balance of nature. But
to Ponyo this is not a disaster but an opportu-
nity, for she rides the waves to get to Sosuke,
and by the time she arrives, she has become a
fully human girl. The rest of the film concerns
the resolution of two problems: to get the sea
to resume its proper place and to keep Ponyo
and Sosuke together.
Presiding over Ponyo’s transformation from
fish to girl, and her progress from sea to land,
are an abundance of maternal figures whose
collective magic ultimately neutralizes the pa-
ternal sorcery that continually tries to impede
the heroine’s growth—for not only is the sea
ruled by the goddess Gran Mamare, but the
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land also is almost a complete matriarchy. With
Sosuke’s father away on duty with the navy,
Sosuke is cared for by his mother, Lisa; three
old women at the care home where she works;
and his kindergarten teacher—along with other
minor female characters who lend occasional
kindly support. These mothers—wholly absent
in Disney and largely so in Andersen11—work
cooperatively to mediate between the two
worlds and permit the heroine to choose one
without wholly losing the other.
The mothers’ parenting strategy contrasts
sharply with the misguided, often absurd, con-
trolling paternalism of Fujimoto, whom Ponyo
herself regards as an “evil wizard” (Art 248),
though for the audience his valence is probably
more complex. (Miyazaki said that he based
this character on his friend, animator Katsuya
Kondo, who had recently become a father, and
that he represents the typical well-meaning but
inept Japanese father of today [Ponyo, Special
Features]). Fujimoto, like Disney’s Ursula, is
an animator—though whereas she transforms
life, he creates and regulates it. When we first
see him, he is dripping his elixir into the ocean,
making primitive creatures appear. He clearly
regards himself as a sort of god (Art 31) as in
the performance of his perceived duty to guard
and govern his creations, he shines his magic
flashlight to scrutinize a passing squid. His
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Figure 3: Ponyo’s
evolving limbs.
concern is admirable, yet we are constantly
reminded that this is no god but a mere man
with a few superpowers. The clumsy, Rube
Goldberg–like contraptions he engineers fail
to work. The seals on the heavy doors of his
undersea palace leak, and the device he has
invented to hydrate himself so that he can walk
on land creaks with every awkward step. His
protectiveness would at times come across
as abusive—such as when he tries to squeeze
Ponyo back into a goldfish in his hands, to
make her once again “innocent and pure”
(Art 239)—if it were not so pathetically inef-
fectual. As he himself is aware, his daughter’s
maternally inherited magic is stronger than his
own, for Gran Mamare (so much larger than her
husband that it is hard to envision them mat-
ing) seems to embody the sea itself—the fertile
medium without which Fujimoto’s little secre-
tions would have no power to bestow life.
As a parent, Gran Mamare is little concerned
with issues of control in any case; her child-
rearing philosophy is more focused on promot-
ing love and growth and therefore on respect
for her child’s will. Thus, whereas Fujimoto per-
sists in calling Ponyo by the “grand” name he
gave her, Brunhilda (!), Gran Mamare instantly
adopts the new, “lovely” one her daughter
prefers.12 Lisa too shares this philosophy of
acceptance. Confronted with a little girl who
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 apparently walked on water to get to her house
on the cliff, who seems to know her son, and
whom Sosuke believes to be a former gold-
fish, she just shakes her head; says, “Life is
mysterious and amazing” (Art 246); and cooks
the children noodles with ham. This strategy
proves superior to Fujimoto’s in part because
it acknowledges the limits of parental power
in a dangerous world. Fujimoto wants to keep
his children safe at all costs; Lisa knows this
is impossible. Accustomed to changed plans,
broken promises, and her own fallibility—her
terrible driving, her rage when her husband
does not come home, her moments of debilitat-
ing sadness—she recognizes that she cannot
save everyone under her care. Therefore, when
the tsunami hits, she leaves the children on
their own in order to look after her elderly pa-
tients. Though American audiences might be
shocked to see a mother walk away from two
five-year-olds in a flood, we are clearly meant to
see her action not as abandonment but as faith
in the children’s own strength—well deserved,
as it turns out, since Sosuke and Ponyo cope
quite competently and even manage to go out
to rescue Lisa in a magically enlarged toy boat.
The adults they encounter on the water respond
to them as able and trustworthy. Since you can-
not keep children safe, the mothers imply, you
have to empower them to take care of them-
selves and each other.
The contrast between paternal and maternal
philosophies determines how the various char-
acters conceive of the problem of the land/sea
imbalance and, therefore, how they conceive
of its solution. The story engages the viewer in
what Miyazaki considers the most important re-
alism of all—moral realism—by presenting com-
peting theories about whose actions led to this
consequence and who is responsible for revers-
ing it.13 We are asked to choose among compet-
ing explanations in order to determine the most
responsible course of action. Fujimoto blames
Ponyo’s initial attraction to the surface—or, in
other words, her desire to grow up and away
from him—and so to him the obvious solution
is to recapture her and force her to regress.
(This view is also shared, early on, by Toki, one
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of the elders on land. When Sosuke first shows
her his new goldfish, she screams and tells him
to throw her back because of the legend that
catching a fish with a face will bring on a tsu-
nami [Art 233]). But the film ultimately shows
the father to be shortsighted and especially
blind to his own culpability. It was Fujimoto,
after all, who created the elixir that brought on
the tsunami; who, in fact, intended to use it
himself eventually, to do just what Ponyo has
done by accident: make the oceans rise up to
drown the sinful land (Art 240). But as his mo-
tives are explained, the audience is brought
to see that we ourselves are also responsible.
He left the land to live under the sea, becom-
ing an alien and misfit in both places, out of
disgust for humans’ mistreatment of their own
world. The crazed nature lover Fujimoto is in
a sense the nemesis aroused when we dump
our garbage into the sea, forgetting that it is, to
paraphrase Disney’s Ariel, part of our world. So
huge a problem obviously cannot be solved by
punishing a child. Once the break between sea
and land has occurred, we cannot go back. As
the mothers in the film recognize, we can only
go forward, to healing, through love.
Fortunately, this solution has been living
within the problem from the time it began since
it was also our human trash that brought Ponyo
to Sosuke in the first place. If Ponyo and Sosuke
truly love each other, Gran Mamare explains,
she may become human forever, and then the
earth will recede from the moon, and the tsu-
nami will end. And even if their love fails, the
goddess explains that Ponyo will become sea
foam, and even that would not be a tragedy
(as it was for Andersen), for that is how all life
began. In other words, if you view the whole
world as a single, connected entity, life never
really ends, but merely suffers a sea change.
Ponyo—The Images
The storyline of Ponyo thus acknowledges far
more openly than The Little Mermaid that magic
is something to outgrow, though not forget, as
we learn to help each other endure and enjoy
what we can of this damaged and dangerous
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 world. This nuanced theme about the value
of imagination can be told in moving pictures
without involving viewers in guilt over the im-
ages’ seductive power. In place of the Disney
film’s unacknowledged ambivalence about its
own medium, Ponyo provides a balanced cri-
tique of the animator’s art. Fujimoto, the artis-
tic director of his own domain, provides a locus
for this exploration. In his overestimation of his
potency and anxiety for control, he resembles
Walt himself—an idea further suggested by the
style of drawing used for his undersea lair. The
rounded and shaded bottles and heavy golden
doors, which would not be out of place in
Fantasia (1940), contrast sharply with the child-
like style used elsewhere in this film (Art 60).
Fujimoto also is given to thinking in Disney-like
binaries: like Ariel in reverse, he chose one
world over the other and now hates his own
origins. He is a divider, vainly constructing bar-
riers to keep liquids in or out and imprisoning
his daughter in a bubble within a larger bubble,
both of which prove to be semipermeable.14
Thus, the viewer is subtly brought to mistrust
his brand of realist magic.
Of course, it is not only in the wizard’s mind
that the land and the sea differ from each
other. In Ponyo, as in The Little Mermaid, the
sea looks magical—rich and strange. Though
26
JFV 66_3 text.indd 26
somewhat flat and simply drawn, it shows itself
as the origin of life through constant motion:
not the swaying and swirling of the Disney film,
but rather a horizontal and diagonal drifting
and gliding of various species, each with its
own slow tempo. There are few fixed points
to provide a sense of direction, so that the
viewer feels lost in space unless something
from the human world—Fujimoto’s sunken boat
or sunlight from the surface—is in frame. The
backgrounds on land, on the other hand, are
largely stationary, until the tsunami comes,
bringing the sea’s animation with it, in carefully
rendered movements of wind and rain. Here, as
Sosuke walks down from his house to the sea
on his first appearance, up is up, and down is
down. Then, when the big waves come, down
becomes the new up. Still, the house remains
a fixed structure on its cliff by the sea, its
precariousness in the storm expressed not by
movement but by lines that lean slightly to the
diagonal, as described by art director Noboru
Yoshida (Art 143).
The sea may be alive in its movements, but
it is not animated to the point of anthropomor-
phism, which Miyazaki abhors, preferring that
humans approach nature with a sense of awe
at its mystery rather than phony identification
(415). Although Miyazaki conceived of the sea
Figure 4: From
Ponyo: “Animator”
Fujimoto in his
­Disneyesque under-
sea lair.
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 as a “principal character” in Ponyo (Art 11),
he would go no farther toward Disneyfication
than to give the waves faces like dolphins (and
even that, he noted in an interview, he feared
might be too much [Ponyo, Special Features]).
Though Miyazaki is careful in distinguishing
species of fish, such as the prehistoric ones
Ponyo and Sosuke encounter as they navigate
the flood, only the part-human Ponyo and
her swarm of sisters—each drawn by hand
with minuscule variations, like a team of tiny
gymnasts in orange uniforms—have anything
approaching individual personalities. And they
too are unable to play instruments or sing or
even make eye contact as long as they remain
in their own world.
Psychological realism is reserved for the
land; Miyazaki’s audience, like Ponyo herself,
must go ashore in search of characters with
whom they can connect emotionally. This
world, unlike Prince Eric’s banal realm, has its
own visual seductiveness to compete with the
sea’s serene beauty. In this respect Miyazaki
follows Andersen, as Disney did not; he too
tells a story, in pictures, that has the power
to reawaken audiences to the beauty of their
own surroundings. Thus, Sosuke’s house,
though unanimated, is drawn with rounded
lines and bright colors to convey the warmth of
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JFV 66_3 text.indd 27
the family who lives there (Art 100). On land,
though backgrounds generally stay still, people
express their personalities with idiosyncratic
movement—for example, Fujimoto’s squeaky
walk with his hydrator and Lisa’s slamming of
pots and pans and hurling herself onto the bed.
Here the energy that led Ponyo to the surface
becomes a charming human “hyperactivity”
that bounces her irrepressibly from couch to
chair to table until she suddenly falls into the
deep slumber of energetic toddlers everywhere.
And faces, though still caricatures or simpli-
fied as in manga, are given details as needed
to express emotion: a patch of red on a cheek,
a white square of light in an eye. Ponyo’s own
face gains in features and in expressiveness,
the longer she stays with Sosuke and Lisa.
Both land and sea, therefore, have their
own magic. And the audience is never forced,
like Ariel and Fujimoto, to give up one for the
other. Because the story mainly concerns their
shifting, developing relationship—and the way
we internalize that relationship—both worlds
are almost continuously in frame together.
Miyazaki identified “the sea below” with “our
subconscious mind, [which] intersects with
the wave-tossed surface above” (Art 11). After
the tsunami, the sea covers the surface so
that the children can look down and watch
Figure 5: From
Ponyo: Devonian-era
fish swim above
the land.
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 Devonian-era fish gliding along—simply, as
if pulled along against the background and
with a marked absence of catchy lyric and
­choreography—above the roads and even the
trees of the former landscape. Here we see
both the contrasts between the two domains
and their now-troubled connection, as the dis-
turbed subconscious has obtruded itself to de-
mand the humans’ attention. The fish achieve
human interest only when Sosuke and Ponyo
name the species to each other (Art 256), like
the young Adam and Eve of this strange new-
old world, not inventing and bestowing names
but discovering what they are truly called—
words that, remarkably, both children, from
their different backgrounds, are able to recog-
nize as correct. And the fish ultimately will go
back below, their thoughts about it all, such as
they are, kept mysteriously to themselves.
In choosing a life among the humans, while
keeping the sea in sight and in memory, Ponyo
does with her imagination and her childhood
just what Miyazaki has said he would like
his audiences to do with theirs: honor it, but
grow up. Sosuke makes an origami goldfish
to console himself after Ponyo the goldfish is
recaptured by her father, but it is no substitute
for the real thing. Similarly, watching animated
films, however enchanting, is no substitute for
going out and living a fulfilling life.
Two Animators and the Problem
of Reality
With such a belief about the real-world conse-
quences of entertainment, an animator would
be tempted, as Miyazaki says he sometimes
has been,15 to stop making movies altogether.
The alternative is to find a way to make movies
that—rather than leaving children jaded and
whiny, fit only for placatory sugar and another
video—inspire them to go out and appreciate
the beauty of their own world, just like Ander-
sen’s little listeners when his mermaid tale was
over. Miyazaki hoped, for example, that after
seeing My Neighbor Totoro (1988), children
might “go out to run around the fields or pick
28
JFV 66_3 text.indd 28
up acorns. Or . . . play in the thickets behind
shrines, or become excited while peeking in the
crawl spaces under their houses” (355–56). To
make the kind of animated film that can thus
stimulate viewers’ imaginations, he believes
every artist involved in the process, down to
the smallest cog in the commercial animation
machine, must be encouraged to draw from her
deepest “dreams” and put her individual vi-
sion before the group (25–26). This has meant
resisting inflexible and regimented systems of
production in order to be able to adjust to the
particular strengths of a given team—especially
avoiding trying to imitate the Disney model,
which by all accounts is far more top-down, or
stereotypically Japanese, than Studio Ghibli
(59–60).16
When Miyazaki’s artists draw from their
“subconscious mind” (Art 11) in order to reach
their audience, they are contacting the child
self that Ponyo suggests is submerged in every
adult. For this reason, children are not merely
the end point of his creations, but are also the
starting point from which they spring—hence
the title of the first volume of his reflections on
his career—and to which he constantly returns,
through dreams and memories of the past and
also through talking and listening to children
in the present. This contact with the child mind
is the source of the prevailing mood of nostal-
gia in so many of his films: a word that to him
means not only the poignant sense of loss of
an earlier time experienced by adults, but also
a yearning for possibilities beyond those life
seems to offer, experienced by even the very
young with little to remember (Miyazaki 18).
Children in the audience may emerge from a
dip in these deep waters energized to go out
and realize their visions. And the adults sitting
beside them may also come out refreshed, per-
haps more hopeful about our broken world.
Disney also, of course, loved children. In a
sense he may even have created the child as it
exists in the mythic imagination of the American
adult: innocent as a goldfish, requiring the pro-
tection of the Fujimoto-like bubble of sanitized
entertainments to fend off maturation. He too
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 was concerned about the moral tendency of
movies for children, and so it was important to
him to be sure he was making the right kind.
For him, that meant increasing superficial real-
ism, creating animated worlds so fully finished
and detailed that they could effectively replace
the heterogeneous, lawless fantasies of his
audience’s private subconscious. But once the
required expensive gadgetry and exorbitant
labor costs became unsustainable, he, like
Miyazaki, had to decide whether it was really
worth it to keep churning out cartoons as flat as
anything seen on Saturday morning television
in Japan or the United States. Gradually he lost
interest, leaving it to his successors to engineer
the revival of the classic style with films such as
The Little Mermaid, and turned his attention to
the real world, which seemed to him much more
important. And so he created Disneyland.17
NOTES
1. John Lasseter, director of many Pixar films,
praises Miyazaki for his avoidance of the over-fast
pace of American animated films and describes
scenes he admires from My Neighbor Totoro (1988)
and Castle of Cagliostro (1979) in which characters
simply wait or stop to react (11–12).
2. The most surrealistic sequences are often night-
mares: besides Alice, one might also consider “Pink
Elephants on Parade” in Dumbo (1941) and the very
similar “Heffalumps and Woozles” sequence in Win-
nie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968). I discuss
this idea in more detail in “Escape from Wonderland:
Disney and the Female Imagination” and in “Home
by Tea-Time: Fear of Imagination in Disney’s Alice in
Wonderland.”
3. For a discussion of politics at the Disney studios
in the 1940s, see Allen and Denning. For a detailed
and subtle discussion of Walt Disney’s political views,
see Watts. A tradition of criticism of Disney that began
with Richard Schickel’s 1968 biography posits the
attempt to commodify and homogenize children’s
imagination. For a review of these critiques, see Ga-
bler (xviii–xix). For specific criticism along these lines,
see Hansen on Benjamin and Adorno’s reactions to
Disney; Zipes, introduction and chapter 3; Smoodin;
and Giroux, throughout.
4. Neal Gabler notes the dissatisfaction of Disney’s
staff with the Rotoscope technique, especially in
Cinderella (460); Miyazaki also singles out this film to
illustrate why copying live action does not realistically
convey action at all (74–75).
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JFV 66_3 text.indd 29
5. As Thomas Lamarre points out, even live-action
film is not “real” but a decoding and recoding of live
movement (362).
6. Disney struggled with the limitations of realism
as a goal and often spoke to his staff of the need to
“combine realism and caricature” (Gabler 336–37).
He particularly favored caricature as a way of mak-
ing the characters more emotionally relatable (336).
Gabler describes the difficulties Disney’s staff had
in deciding how to approach the drawing of humans
within their realist aesthetic, from the time of Snow
White (1939); they even hired real dwarfs to pose for
them, though these drawings were not used (Gabler
248, 250). Gabler also describes Disney’s attempts,
beginning in 1944, to embrace a more modern, surre-
alist style in the manner of Dali, who briefly worked at
the studio. But finding it not conducive to the kind of
storytelling for which he had become famous, Disney
gradually lost interest in it (Gabler 414–15, 423, 442).
7. Laura Sells connects Ariel’s singing with “jouis-
sance” in feminist theory (184). Sells and Jack Zipes
take issue with Trites on the feminism of Andersen’s
story (Sells 180). See also White (191).
8. As Sells notes, Andersen’s tale is often seen as an
autobiographical allegory about class. His tragic view
of love did not, then, apply exclusively to women (177).
9. See White (188); Trites (148).
10. See Sells (178).
11. See Trites (152).
12. In Japanese, Miyazaki says, “Ponyo” is ono-
matopoetic, suggesting softness, as of a cheek or
belly (Ponyo, Special Features).
13. Miyazaki especially dislikes animation, whether
Japanese or American, in which actions are separated
from consequences: “mecha” anime’s celebration of
the power of machines without concern for their de-
structiveness (45–46); battle plots, derived from Nin-
tendo games, in which the motivation is unimportant
(82–83); and the similar “decadence” and “squalid”
appearance of Max Fleischer cartoons such as Betty
Boop and the Color Classics (114). Indifference to the
natural relation between actions and consequences,
he feels, produces a sense of helplessness and cyni-
cism in viewers. His remarks throughout Starting Point
make clear that this is the effect he wishes to combat
with his own animated films.
14. In discussing My Neighbor Totoro, Susan Napier
refers to the “porous membrane” between fantasy
and reality (160), which I see embodied more literally
in the bubbles in Ponyo.
15. Miyazaki’s latest film, The Wind Rises (2014), is
advertised as his last.
16. Comparisons are often made between the Dis-
ney studio and German concentration camps: Giroux
calls it Auschwitz (55); Lewis, Mouschwitz (88).
17. A review of Disneyland in the New Yorker, on 7
September 1963, refers to the theme park as a new
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 kind of cartoon, “where, in this most elaborate of the
Master’s animated productions, his live public has
been fitted into the cartoon frame to play an aesthetic
as well as an economic role” (qtd. in Gabler 535).
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———. “Home by Tea-Time: Fear of Imagination in
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FILMOGR APHY
Alice in Wonderland. Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton
Luske, and Wilfred Jackson. Walt Disney Company
Studios, 1951. Film.
Cinderella. Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and
Wilfred Jackson. Walt Disney Company Studios,
1950. Film.
Dumbo. Dir. Ben Sharpsteen. Walt Disney Company
Studios, 1941. Film.
Fantasia. Dir. Ben Sharpsteen. Walt Disney Company
Studios, 1940. Film.
The Little Mermaid. Dir. Ron Clements and Jon Musker.
Walt Disney Company Studios, 1989. Film.
My Neighbor Totoro. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Studio
Ghibli, 1988. English version, Walt Disney Company
Studios, 2006. Film.
The Old Mill. Dir. Wilfred Jackson. Walt Disney Com-
pany Studios, 1937. Film.
Peter Pan. Dir. Clyde Geronimi, Hamilton Luske, and
Wilfred Jackson. Walt Disney Company Studios,
1953. Film.
Ponyo. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli, 2008.
English version, Walt Disney Company Studios,
2009. Film.
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Dir. David Hand.
Walt Disney Company Studios, 1939. Film.
Spirited Away. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli,
2001. English version, Walt Disney Company Stu-
dios, 2002. Film.
The Wind Rises. Dir. Hayao Miyazaki. Studio Ghibli,
2014. Film.
Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day. Dir. Wolfgang
Reitherman. Walt Disney Company Studios, 1968.
Film.
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