Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Ponyo
2008 · Hayao Miyazaki · Ponyo on Sightlines
A girl in a red dress runs across the tops of the waves.
She isn't walking on water like a miracle. She's running on the crests, and the crests are running too, a herd of them galloping along under her feet. Look closely and the waves have eyes. Miyazaki drew those eyes himself. He drew the ocean as an animal and then let a five-year-old loose on top of it.
Hold that shot. Nearly everything worth saying about Ponyo is inside it.
Start with the running. Ponyo is moving as fast as small legs can move, and she isn't the one covering the distance. The sea is. Deleuze borrowed a name for this from musicals: the movement of world. In an ordinary chase, a person moves through a world that stays put. In a dance number something flips over. The dancer stops driving the movement, the dance takes over, and the world does the moving while the body is carried inside it. Hisaishi's score knows which register this is. It swells into open Wagner pastiche under a preschooler in a red dress, because the sequence is a musical number and the ocean is the choreography. Ponyo's father Fujimoto schemes to pull her back down into the water. The sea carries her up onto the land. Either way, the ocean is the thing with legs.
Then the eyes. This usually gets filed under "animism" and left there, as though it were a cultural label rather than a technique. It is more precise than that. Bergson starts from an odd premise, and Deleuze builds his entire cinema on it: before there are people looking at things, there is a universe of images acting on each other, and perception sits inside matter rather than in front of it. Deleuze calls this the plane of immanence, an acentered world where the eye is in things. Plenty of films tell you the sea is alive. Ponyo draws a pupil into the wave. And the wave isn't one animal. The water bulges and gallops like a school of enormous fish, a mass behaving as a single feeling. Deleuze calls that a dividual: one body made of many, where you can't pull the crowd apart from the one thing it is doing.
Which brings us to why it had to be made by hand. 170,000 drawn frames, no computer effects, chosen deliberately after the dense machinery of Howl's Moving Castle as a return to first principles. Deleuze's opening claim in Cinema 1 is that older arts picked the privileged instant, the pose that sums up a whole action, the discus thrower frozen at the top of his wind-up. Cinema gave that up. It samples ordinary instants, equidistant, mechanically, and builds movement out of nothing special. The any-instant-whatever. He said the animated cartoon belongs fully to cinema for exactly this reason: a drawn figure is never a completed shape, only a shape in the middle of forming or dissolving. Ponyo is the maximum case of that sentence. A hundred and seventy thousand ordinary instants, each one decided by a hand. The sea can turn into fish and back because nothing in it was ever a finished form to begin with. Simulated water has to obey a model of water. Miyazaki's water obeys a mood.
And then the largest thing in the film, which the film treats as the smallest. A boy finds a goldfish in trouble and does something about it, and the ocean rises. Deleuze, after Bergson, insists that the whole is not a container. It isn't the sum of what's in the frame plus what's offscreen. The whole is the Open, and the Open is whatever changes. Sets can be closed; duration can't. Miyazaki makes the boundary between the land and the sea as porous as a crayon line, and then runs his argument straight through it. A five-year-old's promise is a change in the whole, so the whole heaves.
This is where the film stops being merely lovely and starts making a claim about cinema.
Deleuze's two books turn on a break. In the movement-image, a character sees a situation and acts, and the act changes the situation. After the war that circuit snapped, and the neorealists gave us people, very often children, who could only stand and look at what was in front of them. Ever since, seriousness in film has tended to mean one thing: your action will not be adequate to what you have seen. Ponyo restores the circuit on purpose, at ridiculous scale. The sea is a textbook encompasser, the milieu that surrounds everything and calls out for an act, and the film runs the large form of the action-image without embarrassment. Overwhelming situation, decisive act, situation transformed. Except the decisive act is a small boy meaning what he says. Read it as naivety and you miss the choice. Miyazaki had the materials for an elegy sitting right there, including his own long anxiety about a poisoned ocean. Takahata used the same house animism in Pom Poko to write a lament for what people do to the natural world. Miyazaki looked at a tsunami and drew a girl coming to visit.
He had been building toward it for thirty-five years. Panda! Go, Panda! in 1972, which he wrote and laid out, already had the shape: a small child, a large benign non-human friend, a flooded house, stakes scaled to a toddler. Future Boy Conan in 1978 fixed the vocabulary, drowned coastlines and elastic super-powered children running across water and a boy meeting an otherworldly girl. Ponyo's run along the crests is a Conan stunt shrunk to preschool size. My Neighbor Totoro supplied the emotional template down to the absent mother and the dread that keeps dissolving into awe, and Ponyo is Totoro relocated from forest to sea. Kiki's Delivery Service gave him the coastal town, the rule that magic works in proportion to a girl's emotional confidence, and Hisaishi warming ordinary domestic life until dinner feels like weather. From Andersen he kept two things, the transformation by love and the sea-king father who forbids it, and threw out the self-erasure, the pain, the silence, the foam. That deletion is the thesis.
Miyazaki's invention here is narrow and enormous. He gave the water a face and a will, by hand, in the decade when water was becoming a physics problem for everyone else, and then handed the plot over to it. Watch it again and watch the sea instead of the faces. Count how often the ocean is the one doing the acting, and how little the humans are asked to do. Sosuke has exactly one job, which is to mean what he said. The film leaves the question standing where you can't avoid it: this is a cosmology in which a child's promise is load-bearing. Fantasy, or the last working argument in cinema that an act can be equal to a situation? Miyazaki spent a hundred and seventy thousand drawings on the second answer.
Concepts in play
- movement of world — The film's central image: a girl in a red dress running across the crests of waves, borne by water that gallops under her, with Hisaishi's score swelling into open Wagnerian pastiche — the body carried while the world does the moving.
- the plane of immanence — Miyazaki personally animated the sea as a living creature, drawing eyes into the waves — perception located inside matter rather than in front of it; Ghibli's purest expression of animism as a technique, not a theme.
- any-instant-whatever — No computer effects; some 170,000 hand-drawn frames, a deliberate return to first principles after Howl's Moving Castle — water that is never a completed figure, always mid-formation, so it can bulge into fish and back.
- the Open — A five-year-old's promise carries cosmological weight: Ponyo's longing to be human sets the ocean itself heaving, and the boundary between land and sea is as porous as a crayon line.
- the encompasser — The sea functions as the surrounding milieu that calls forth the act — Fujimoto schemes to return Ponyo to it, the ocean rises against the clifftop town, and everything in the film answers to it.
- action-image, large form — Overwhelming global situation (the heaving ocean, the sea-goddess mother's judgment) resolved by one decisive small act — a boy who rescued a stranded goldfish keeping his word — and Miyazaki's stated faith in small children as moral agents.
- dividual — Water that 'bulges and gallops like a school of enormous fish' — a mass of bodies rendered as one affective unit, the crowd inseparable from the single motion it performs.
- liquid perception (reume) — The whole film is set in and on moving water — a fishing town whose boundary with the ocean dissolves, the flood rendered as drift and wonder rather than catastrophe — perception unanchored from solid ground.