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Rating: After years of VHS tapes from Hong Kong, pirated recordings, videos in incomprehensible languages, stories told by lucky travelers from Japan, fleeting TV broadcasts, reviews in specialized magazines, photos taken secretly, and tapes burned in the RAI archives... after years of raw videos, English and Spanish fansubs, Matroska files, inadequate distributors, inaccurate versions, and disowned dubbings... after a thousand perils, on July 9, 2008, the relationship between the film distributor Lucky Red by Andrea Occhipinti (a cinema talent scout of rare finesse in the Italian market) and Studio Ghibli, the famous Japanese animation studio that produced some of the best Japanese films of the last twenty years, was made official. In this way, the movies of Miyazaki & company finally found a sufficiently serious and consistent distributor after years with wealthy but not always suitable subjects (like Disney, for instance, with cuts, fanciful adaptations, etc.). All Japanese animation enthusiasts rejoiced on that July 9, 2008.
On March 20, 2009, the third film born from this collaboration was released (the first two were Howl's Moving Castle and Tales from Earthsea), namely the highly anticipated and much-hyped Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea by the great Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki. After a promotional campaign equal to that of non-animated films, the movie was released in theaters to a warm reception from fans. The story, somewhat inspired by Andersen's The Little Mermaid, tells of a goldfish with a human face who, after meeting a little boy named Sosuke who gives her the name of Ponyo, wishes to become a girl and stay on land; she licks blood from Sosuke's scratch and, once recaptured by her father/magician/god-of-the-sea's-husband and returned to the depths, she drinks a sort of life elixir, acquiring magical powers that allow her to grow limbs, hair, and all necessary features. Violating the room where her father kept the magical elixir causes a tsunami that overwhelms Sosuke's village, keeping the boy away from his mother Risa, who went to help the elderly at the nursing home where she works. Sosuke and Ponyo will embark on a journey to find the mother and restore the ecosystem.
The film was met with great surprise in Venice because it was made entirely with traditional animation techniques without even turning on a computer (except for editing and other technical phases), which isn't a small feat in the era of 3D films. Indeed, the visual aspect is extraordinarily crafted, with pastel-colored backgrounds and characters painted with tempera like we hadn't seen in a long time; even the opening credits are designed with great simplicity and a stylized touch. The pencil-like quality of the film erupts in extraordinary visual inventions such as the tsunami wave, rendered as a school of frenzied water fish, or the scenography of the beautiful, paradisiacal village splashed with every color where Sosuke lives. A commendation also goes to the figure of Ponyo's father: his look is stunning, and the wonderful striped clothes seem to come directly from the hand of Yohji Yamamoto. While the graphics add points to the film, the narrative instead lacks clarity, especially in the second part, when the characters appear driven by unclear motivations that make the film's view somewhat confusing: this is a flaw Miyazaki often shows, and his films often require a second viewing to be fully appreciated. It might be a process of "subtracting" done on the script that, if pushed too far, risks omitting lines that would have favored greater understanding of the work, making everything vaguely abstract and unreal. The sense of unreality increases because, as is typical of Japanese cinema, much is left unsaid or unexplained, or absurd events occur such as the boats of tsunami survivors full of gleeful, colorful, and festive people. Despite some narrative flaws, the film reaches a dignified conclusion and stands as a good directorial effort by Miyazaki: "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea" is far from the master's masterpieces (like the immense "Howl's Moving Castle"), but it manages to be liked for the awkward and imaginative unreality it proposes and for which one shouldn't ask questions. It is not a fairy tale, nor is it a fable (it lacks the standard elements): it is a story explicitly dedicated to a very young audience who will find in this film 100 minutes of carefree fun.
The film's only truly painful flaw is its Italian adaptation. Here we enter a purely technical part that probably doesn't interest 90% of the audience that will go to the theater to see the film, but it requires a few lines, at least for anime enthusiasts (Japanese animated cartoons). In its relationship with Lucky Red, Studio Ghibli insisted on no cuts and maximum fidelity to the original script: this pushed the distribution company to rely on the collaboration of Gualtiero Cannarsi, very famous among otaku (anime fans) for having curated the Italian edition of the cult "Neon Genesis Evangelion". The result was not excellent: aside from the use of "-chan", a diminutive particle unknown to the Italian audience that, in my opinion, should have been removed and replaced somehow, the worst was the glaring artificiality of the language. It sounded like dialogues translated with BabelFish, or rather dialogues translated word for word and not adapted: this is a serious problem because the Japanese DO NOT speak like us and use expressions and syntactic forms very different from ours; Japanese does not even stem from the Indo-European branch, so it's easy to understand how it is a language very distant from ours. If it's already unfeasible to translate a film from French (a language very close to us) and leave it unadapted, this is even more true for Japanese: the film's characters used bizarre, paraphrastic, and outdated forms that nobody in spoken language uses, even though in reality the characters are old ladies and children who surely were speaking particularly colloquial language in the original (paradoxically, the characters with the smoothest language were the sea goddess and her noble husband).
The same mistake of excessive fidelity was made by Cannarsi in the series Abenobashi - Magical Shopping Arcade and the Card Captor Sakura movie, which may have very faithful dubs, but have dialogues so close to the original that they sound truly awkward, if not downright annoying. Mediaset is notoriously famous for its distorted adaptations, Cannarsi exaggerates on the opposite side: will a balance ever be found?
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