Leave it to revered Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki to make a movie like "Ponyo" — a fairy tale that introduces strong environmental themes without (as any other cartoon creator would) wringing moral lessons from them.
It's a tale whose initial weirdness is deceptive, morphing into one of the most conventional, true-love-prevails templates ever employed by storytellers. Conventional, that is, if you overlook the fact that the lovers are a 5-year-old boy and a fish.
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The boy is Sosuke, a generically good-natured kid who rescues an odd-looking creature one day in a tidepool (she's trapped in a bit of trash dredged up by massive fishing boats) and discovers she has magical powers. He doesn't know the half of it: The "fish," named Ponyo by Sosuke, is just one of the hundreds of daughters of Fujimoto, a human who has renounced his species and become an undersea magician on a save-the-seas mission the screenplay doesn't care to explain.
Fujimoto's mysterious projects give Miyazaki a chance to deploy some of his famous dreamlike imagery in the movie's opening scenes, but Fujimoto soon becomes a more straightforward presence: an agitated man in a Swinging London outfit (voiced in the English-language version by Liam Neeson) who tries to "rescue" Ponyo from Sosuke before she uses her magic to transform herself permanently into a human girl.
In the course of his pursuit, Fujimoto unleashes fairly creepy, bloblike tidal creatures who cause a massive rainstorm and flood. The children are separated from Sosuke's mother, and the small town beneath their cliffside home is submerged. It's not as terrifying a situation as the supernatural one that strands the girl in "Spirited Away," but it's dark enough at moments to upset younger or more sensitive viewers.
The pair's search for Mom affords a few glimpses of the fantastic imagery Miyazaki is known for, but is much more tame in spirit than many of his films; plot-wise, it winds up being no more strange than "The Little Mermaid." It ends happily, casting aside the dark concerns of Ponyo's overprotective dad and forgetting about Sosuke's own father, who captains a ship and spends little time at home — unresolved issues that, in all likelihood, will fester into something magical, weird and just a tiny bit upsetting by the time the master's next movie rolls around.
