Like much of Hayao Miyazaki's work, Ponyo (2008) carries a transparent environmental message: "They spoil the sea. They treat your home like their empty, black souls", (Fujimoto) referring to his fish-like daughter wanting to live on land.
The environmental message in Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo is clear, the world’s natural balance must be respected. The pure beauty of Miyazaki’s animated ocean, swarming with stunning life, juxtaposed with the land’s polluted ugliness makes for a stark contrast right from the beginning. Ponyo’s irritable wizard father (Fujimoto) is repulsed by humans and their trash, and resents that his daughter is so infatuated with the world above the ocean; sound familiar? Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo is inspired by Hans Christian Anderson’s book, The Little Mermaid, but is unique in many many ways.
Studio Ghibli’s Ponyo is a love letter to the environment and a call to action to humankind for start taking responsibility for the natural world. The film involves a fish-like creature, Ponyo, falling in love with a human, and the two of them figuring out how to maintain that relationship in their colliding worlds of land and sea. This is reminiscent of Hans Christian Anderson’s story The Little Mermaid, but rather than a sexual romantic relationship like The Little Mermaid and many mermaid-inspired films to follow, Ponyo focuses on a more inoffensive and deeper love. The love between them represents Sosuke’s reverential devotion to the environment.
Sosuke’s character represents humanity, or at least what humanity could be, and Ponyo represents the ocean and thus the environment as a whole.
Sosuke is more in-tune with the environment than his mother, and to that point, the children are much more caring towards the environment compared to all adults in the film. Sosuke approaches the environment and the ocean with genuine curiosity and love, while the same elements cause the adults great stress. Miyazaki doesn’t necessarily blame the adults for lack of interest in the natural world- they have stressful lives where they must work hard to live- he simply points out that children should be entrusted and empowered to think for themselves when it comes to nature, due to their innocence and free time and minds, and that we should take lessons from their curiosity.
Ponyo’s parents are an embodiment of the ocean, and with that, its duality. It is either life-giving and nurturing (Ponyo’s mother), or something we should be cautious of (Ponyo’s father). Here we see the dual personalities of Ponyo’s mother and father, the film makes it clear that the ocean and environment can be both at the same time. We learn from them that the more we take from nature, the more destructive it becomes. Sosuke’s harbour town had clearly been abusing a one-sided relationship with nature. But if we as humans adopted a more mutual relationship, as Sosuke has with Ponyo, in which we care for nature whilst learning from it, thus keeping the world in balance.
Let’s take a deeper dive into the storyline (excuse the pun). The film starts with Ponyo meeting Sosuke, who ‘rescues’ her and takes her to nursery with him in a plastic bucket. Ponyo blurts out to Sasuke that she loves him - after tasting a bit of his blood when he rescued her she took on some human ability. Ponyo is briefly recaptured by her agitated, humanity hating father, but returns once more to the surface, this time in human form. Ponyo brings along a forceful storm caused by her disruption of Fujimoto's magic, ocean-changing potions. After the rain diminishes, the waters have risen so high that they cover the entire town, with primaeval fish swimming down former city streets and a low moon pulling a fleet of commercial ships (including the one captained by Sosuke's father) close to an enormous, suspended wall of water. Into this upside-down world, Ponyo and Sosuke set out in a candle-powered boat to try to restore order to their world. As the flood is ceased by Ponyo’s mother, the once close-minded elderly people of the town are mesmerised when they meet her, an ocean goddess, and irrevocably recognise that they must respect the power nature has and nurture it.
Ultimately, Ponyo and Sosuke’s relationship and adventures offer us a new prototype for handling manmade damages, one that empowers the audience regardless of age to play their part. They show us just how world-changing it could be to love the environment.
By the film’s end, all the adults respect and listen to Sosuke. This is something our societies need to follow. Not only are children the future, but they also need to be trusted and empowered if we want to prepare them for the perils that await our planet. Environmentalism is a common theme across Studio Ghibli films, which typically also include the same hope that the next generation will be our way through the climate crisis. Ponyo emphasises that the younger and future generations have been forced to bear the burdens of caring for a struggling climate, but that they do contain the knowledge and power to handle it. Greta Thunberg is a great example of how future generations are leading the way.
If Sosuke’s pure love for Ponyo taught us anything, it's that we are responsible for what we love and that we all have a role to play in caring for the environment.
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