Yesterday we took Ruby to see her first movie (not counting my one-time attempt to take her to Big Movies for Little Kids, and which was just clearly way too early because she spent the entire time running up and down the aisle and that was only fun for about 20mins). We have all been enjoying her infatuation with Hayao Miyazaki's movies, so when we saw that he had a new one, Ponyo, we were sold.

She loved it and she only spent about 10mins running up and down the stairs and going to the bathroom (which involved using escalators and was really the reason for missing a few minutes of the movie).

David and I like his movies for a lot of reasons. The art is amazing, they are totally fascinating imaginative stories and they are not American. You simply could not imagine some of the social situations that he portrays appearing in any American movie--I'm not quite sure how Miyazaki deals with Disney but he seems to pull it off. He has plenty of female lead characters and they are all feisty, strong and opinionated. His male characters are loving, comfortable taking leadership from the women and they are show real emotions, and (gasp) cry unabashedly.

This movie wasn't our favorite though. I haven't read up on it yet, but did quickly see that it's his interpretation of the Little Mermaid. Given that I recently tossed a book on the Little Mermaid that Ruby had gotten from who knows where, I kind of don't want to say anything bad about Pongo. It's NOT about a mermaid who wants nothing more than to be someone else because she wants to be an anorexic woman who can only define herself through her marriage to a self-centered Prince. Yippee. And Miyazaki clearly uses this movie to make a statement about our polluted seas. Double yippee.

But his story in Pongo was still a little boring compared to some of his other completely crazy surreal stories where you can barely keep up with the plot. And there is a little too much emphasis on two people loving each other and the power of love and all that jazz. So his focus on the environmental catastrophes that we face ends up feeling like a gratuitous point that he tries to slip in and it gets lost. He also seems to have deliberately chosen a simpler animation scheme this time, with less colors and simpler forms. Not horrible at all, and at times still stunning (big angry dark waves that look like huge blue fish is kinda of awesome and scary at the same time).

All that said, we're still huge Miyazaki fans.