Water, Fluidity & “Sea-nema”: An Analysis of Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (2008)

Cet essai de recherche a été soumis au département des études filmiques (Department of Film Studies) de l'Université de St Andrews. Il est entièrement rédigé en anglais et respecte les normes bibliographiques de style Chicago.

In her short essay, Erika Balsom recounts Sigmund Freud’s discussion of the “oceanic feeling”, a notion coined by Romain Rolland in a 1927 letter addressed to the psychoanalyst. As she defines it as “the sensation of an unbreakable bond between oneself and the outside[1]”, she writes: “Rather than any assertion of autonomy or mastery, oceanic feeling is a quasi sublime state in which the integrity of the self is lost, or at least compromised, in a sense of limitlessness, unboundedness, and interconnectedness.[2]” Conjuring it up as the metaphor to describe this stormy vertigo inside the self when they are facing nature and its manifestations, the ocean seems to embody an object of both torment and fascination for the subject, mirroring the ambivalence of the human stance towards the ecosystem. Similarly, the oceanic feeling is revealing of this old dissociation of nature and humanity, underlying the dichotomous dialectics of the human interiority and the environmental exteriority that remain at stake in our culture. For the longest time, humanity has tried to hold control on salted water (thinking for instance about Hugo Grotius’ Mare Liberum published in 1609, dealing with seafaring trade), to understand this enigmatic force, to tame it and thereby to colonise it, always seeking practices to know

“the power and action of fire, water, air, stars, the heavens, and all the other bodies that are around us as distinctly as we know the different trades of our craftsmen, [so that] we could put them to all the uses for which they are suited and thus make ourselves as it were the masters and possessors of nature[3]”,

according to Descartes’ words. This human desire of both theoretically and practically reigning over biodiversity culminated when humankind entered a new epoch of human domination characterised by utilitarian “philosophy” and massive ecological destructions affecting the atmosphere more than two thousand years ago: the Anthropocene. Victims of overfishing, pollution and acidification, oceans and seas continue to be spaces of political naval battles. Yet, apart from this instrumentalisation, the intriguing nature of water also spawned an abundant imagery of aquatic artistic representations, generating a torrent of seascapes and marine representations in the visual culture. As Nicole Starosielski relates, after seeing the ocean as “a site over which cultural politics and tension unfolded, [underwater cinema] began to frame the aquatic landscape as our neighborhood, an episteme that has become foundational to modern marine environmental discourse.[4]” Hayao Miyazaki, whose work is known for conveying ecological messages denouncing the world’s current failure of sustainability and lack of regard to nature, follows this late tradition. In Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the director prompts the audience to review the conception of seascapes as mere inert, unliving territories by encouraging us to delve into deep waters in the company of little eponymous heroine Ponyo, an ambiguous being half-fish half-little girl who meets five-year-old human Sōsuke, after having escaped her original marine habitat. For it plays on stunning aesthetics of the flowing element, the film suggests an alternative understanding of water dynamics in response to the reifying anthropocentric discursive frameworks.

To what extent does Miyazaki’s Ponyo offer a singular ecophilosophical perception of the water element, exploiting its fluid properties, presenting it as a useful resource to call the contemporary dominant Anthropocene narratives into question?

This essay aims at exploring the stream of symbolics of water in this “sea-nematic” film. Navigating through the idea of fluidity, Ponyo portrays water under many different forms: from life to love, chaos to revelation, human to nonhuman, it seemingly embodies a porous and powerful entity capable of blurring the frontiers between the multiple cultural binary oppositions that separate worlds.

In Ponyo, Miyazaki proceeds to breathe life into salted waters as he literally gives a magical anima, a soul, to them. As designed by the animator, the ocean is no mere motionless entity but “a living presence[5]”. He asserts: “[b]y distorting normal space and contorting normal shapes, the sea is animated not as a backdrop to the story but as one of its principal characters.[6]” From simple landscape to character, water changes status. If according Deleuze and Guattari’s geophilosophy the sea is “the smooth space par excellence[7]”, in Miyazaki’s work, this vastness becomes modelled figures. Through personification, the sea is transformed into aquatic creatures, coming alive as multiple conscious organisms in the form of strange, will-gifted, humming watery-eyed waves (Figure 1). Close to anthropomorphism, such a characterisation of a traditionally inanimate element confers an autonomous existence to water and undermines any idea of reification of matter. Deployed by Fujimoto, Ponyo’s father, to get her daughter back to the ocean, these waves are however not entirely humanised: indeed, their liquid mass shape is not clearly defined and suggests both instability and pervasiveness of water, highlighting its positive productive power of its own[8]. Engaging with vital materialism in Vibrant Matter, Jane Bennett invents the notion of “thing-power[9]” which aims at considering things as not objects but actants, highlighting the “vitality intrinsic to materiality, in the process absolving matter from its long history of attachment to automatism or mecha­nism[10]”.

(Figure 1) Sōsuke is pursued by waves trying to get Ponyo back.

As she argues, her notion is quite similar to Spinoza’s conatus, a concept that assign to each thing a specific vitality, “an ‘active impulsion’ or trending tendency to persist[11]”. By drawing a peculiar shape to water, Miyazaki seemingly proposes new ways of considering it, imagining it as active forces capable of retaliation. The sea is no longer an immobile entity, it is an actant per se.

The film draws from mythology as well. In the Miyazakian cosmology, Gran Mamare (Figure 2), the Venus-like goddess of the ocean, succeeds the Poseidon/Neptune of the Greek and Latin mythology. Moreover, Ponyo also reconnects with diluvian and eschatological narratives when she causes two very connoted phenomena during her escape: a flood and a tsunami. During the flood sequence, water completely submerges the screen: the spectator is plunged underwater and drawn into the flow, experiencing the potent agency of water.

(Figure 2) After Ponyo’s escape, her mother Gran Mamare comes to meet Fujimoto.

The frame is entirely flooded, saturated with an overflowing accumulation of titanic fishes (Figure 3) redolent of apocalyptic narratives. This sequence, playing on disproportion and scale, tends

“to ‘enwater’ the spectators, i.e. embody them in water, in an immersive and fluid experience. [It] is not simply a marvelous aquarium that confines the spectator to appreciating fine specimens at a distance […] but it is rather a huge pool, an ocean bed, a swampy marsh or a limpid bay in which spectators experience a sense of being engulfed and dragged toward the waterfall of perception, or getting sucked into a whirlpool of emotion.[12]”

Exploiting the dense and liquid properties of water, the film summons the sense of immersion in this fluidity of the image conveyed by the apparent simplicity of drawings - the undersea being designed as deep blue flat tints.

(Figure 3) A waterfall of fishes invades Ponyo’s submarine house.

On the one hand, this cataclysmic event expresses a vehement response of nature to the anthropogenic mistreatment, yet on the other hand, this potentially world-ending vision is anything but tragic and is rather a joyful, roaring wave of life carried by an epic register emphasised by a soundtrack purposely evocative of Richard Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries. When Ponyo reaches the surface, the flood is turned into a tsunami springing from the abysses. The following shots of Ponyo running on the fish-waves (Figure 4) capture the stunning disaster, somehow echoing Hokusai’s print of The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

(Figure 4) Ponyo riding the ocean.

This majestic and sublime demonstration of water borrows a great deal of symbols from the Christian and Jewish tradition. Indeed, as recounted in the Book of Genesis, the flood is a watery chaos created by God to return to a pre-creation state of the universe. In the New Testament, with the Baptism of Christ in the Jordan, water symbolises purification, regeneration and new birth[13]. The flood and tsunami caused by Ponyo were precisely created by a disruption of natural balance when she let water get in her father’s mysterious well, which looks like a lot to a fountain of youth (Figure 5). Fujimoto (who manifests quite explicitly the wrath of nature against humanity) says earlier that when this well will be full, the Era of the Ocean, comparable to the Cambrian Era, will begin and thus end the Era of Man[14]. That is exactly what happened: Ponyo’s escape generated the disappearance of the land and roads under water as well as a return of extinct species of fishes from the Devonian Age (Figure 6). From the actual Anthropocene to the past utopian “Aquacene”, this shift of geological periods suggests a diving into the fluidity of time in which temporalities overlap. The intertwining of past and present is significant in terms of the environmental ethics, bringing together two polarised species: humans and aquatic wildlife. Miyazaki seems therefore to spread ecological awareness by representing the marvels of the marine biodiversity, keeping the spectator’s gaze away from a human-centered actions and redirecting it on what is the most elementary (but perhaps what matters the most): matter.

  In  the introduction of their book Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water and Fire, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Lowell Duckert wonder: “Can the elements invite contemporary thinkers not to some lost Eden or Golden Age […] but to a reinvigorated, future-laden mode of ecomaterial inquiry?[15]” Regarding this interrogation, it seems that Miyazaki both invites the audience to contemplate the – probably idealised - beauty of yesteryear while encouraging natural protection and preservation. Taking the term “apocalypse” literally in the sense of revelation, he thus proceeds to unveil the true potentialities and marvels of the ecosystem, suggesting an alternative perception and understanding of the ocean.

(Figure 5) Fujimoto’s strange fountain of youth.

(Figure 6) Curious anachronistic meeting of Dipnorhynchus and concrete.

Furthermore, the aquatic symbolics in Ponyo not only showcases water as a major source of vitality and life, but they also rely on dynamics of love and acceptation. This leads Shibaji Mridha to interpret this portrayal of water in the film as “a connector, transgressor, and mirror [which] serves one crucial purpose by reminding us the common materiality of the common materiality of the human and the rest of nature[16]”. Because of its transparence and fluidity, water could de facto embody a porous border between pre-conceived dichotomies such as the separation between nature and culture. Blurring the frontier between traditionally opposed and polarised entities, it acts like a resource useful for self-reflection in all sense of the term, a “mirror remind[ing] us of our evolutionary existence and fluid status of being, connecting to the non-human world in a non-anthropocentric way[17]”. Above all, this fluidity “has the power to collapse the binary between the human and non-human world.[18]” Thus, water is depicted as a unifying force, a neutral - because colourless - space of reconciliation rather than a space of violent and contentious colonisation, underlying the idea of a symbiotic interspecies collaboration and thereby developing the sense of mutual care and love[19]. This love is precisely the force that binds Ponyo and Sōsuke beyond any conflictual antagonism.

According to the ancient philosopher Empedocles’ cosmogonic theory, all matter is composed of four elements: air, fire, water and earth and as summarised by Cohen and Duckert, those are “held together by chains of love (philia) [and] pulled apart through endemic strife (neikos), [so that they constantly] are enduring and unstill.[20]” This cosmos is a “psychomachia of Love and Strife as rival, dynamic forces in which the world itself is a material assemblage constantly under (re)construction,” a machine for the production of hybrid objects, bodies, forces. [21]” In Miyazaki’s film, adapted from Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale The Little Mermaid (1837), the fluidity of water is indeed represented by the hybrid character of Ponyo. The love she has for Sōsuke and her family but also her strife for gaining independence and becoming human render her body instable. As a half-fish half-little girl being, Ponyo embodies an in-between figure among humans and undersea inhabitants. Her shape is utterly unstable as she keeps evolving and regressing to her primal state when she gets tired. Towards the end of the film, on their way to find Sōsuke’s mother Lisa, the two children have to go through a tunnel. This is rather a symbolic passage: from a place to another, this is almost an initiation micro-journey. Plunged in the dark, as they are crossing, an odd sound is being heard: it is the bucket held by Ponyo which is dragging on the ground. Exhausted, Ponyo is gradually liquefying and turns into her bird-like intermediary form, her second physical state, a fluid one, of evolution between fish and human (Figure 7). In the sequence, the tunnel is the perfect liminal place, the threshold where occurs her metamorphosis from little girl to fish.

(Figure 7) With stupefaction, Sōsuke realises Ponyo’s transformation.

Interestingly enough, this metamorphosis recreates the inversion of the process of growing up. Her ephemeral human form is (bio)degrading and as she has gotten out of the tunnel, she has become a fish again. Yet her dysmorphia does not repel the little boy whose unconditional love stands out as a posthumanist stance fraught with acceptance of the Other and conscience of ecological responsibility.[22] This evokes the metaphor of love as water functioning as “mirror to remind the characters not only their fluid identity but also their human hubris.[23]” Water seems thus inherently cathartic.

In the artistic realm, water has also been the muse of poetry, drawing on aquatic dreams and innuendos often associated with femininity. Speaking about water divinities, Bachelard, in his essay on the imagination of matter Water and Dreams, already asserts that the element is related to sexualisation and “a mass of desires and images[24]”. He also mentions the “Nausicaä complex” to designate the book iconography of nymphs, nereids, dryads and hamadryads[25]. Putting aside the retrospective hint we can find to Miyazaki’s first animated heroine from Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (Japan, 1984), Ponyo seems to belong to this sensual symbolic of water. In fact, to the ecophilosophical reading may be added an ecofeminist understanding, drawing parallels between the oppression of nature and the oppression of women and their expression concerning their sexuality. This idea of water as a symbolic of sexual desire can be interpreted in Ponyo. According to Miyazaki, “[t]he sea represents the feminine principle, and the land represents the masculine principle[26]”, recreating the binary opposition at stake between genders that is nonetheless shattered by Ponyo’s hybrid body. When she becomes a little girl, her features take the form of a dress: she is truly “becoming” female in de Beauvoir’s sense of the term[27]. Growing up, in search of emancipation, her creation of the flood and the tsunami can be understood as a symbol of irrepressible overflowing desire, vector of chaos and beauty. That is why she can be interpreted at the same time as an emblematic figure of natural empowerment and of female empowerment.

Thus, with Ponyo Miyazaki animates a “sea-nematic” modern fairy tale about salted water, conveying multiple ecological messages, prompting the audience to reflect on the relation between humankind and nonhumans (namely animals and matter) and advocating for the importance of a mutual embrace: an interspecies symbiosis. Indeed, the animator bears the focus on the elementary things wrongly taken for granted and encourages us to “see through the sea” beyond any reductive binary perception of the world that remain deeply engrained in minds by the dominant Anthropocene narratives. Breathing life into water, mythologising matter, he definitely delivers a singular multilayered perception of the water element. Whether it be through ecophilosophy, ecomaterialism, elemental criticism, poetry or ecofeminism, he exploits its fluid properties, presenting it as a useful resource to call the contemporary hegemonic discourse into question. The enchantment of the materiality is perhaps the most effective narrative strategy to unveil the poetical potentialities of elements and a fortiori to arouse a sense of wonderment and responsibility towards the ecosystem. This way, water appears as an insightful framework whose translucidity is “capable of directly communicating symbols and meanings to the spectator, reducing the separation between the fictional space on the screen and the psychic space in front of the screen.[28]” Here lies the clairvoyant philosophy of water which calls for life and love; all in all, for this “oceanic feeling” of interconnectedness. Rather than seasickness, Ponyo is an invitation to dive into the tsunami and to surf on it.

[1]. Erika Balsom, An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea (New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2018), p. 9.

[2]. Ibid.

[3]. René Descartes, Part Six in A Discourse on The Method. Translated by Ian McLean (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1637]), p. 51.

[4]. Nicole Starosielski, “Beyond fluidity: a cultural history of cinema underwater” in Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt (New York; London: Routledge, 2013), p. 165.

[5]. Hayao Miyazaki, Turning Point: 1997-2008. Translated by Beth Cary and Frederick L. Shodt (San Francisco: Viz Media, 2014), p. 419.

[6]. Ibid.

[7]. Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), p. 479.

[8]. Jane Bennett, “Force of Things” in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. 1.

[9]. Ibid., p. 2.

[10]. Ibid., p. 3.

[11]. Ibid., p. 2.

[12]. Adriano D’Aloia, “Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience”, Film and Media Studies, Vol. 5, 2012, p. 88.

[13]. Ibid., p. 90.

[14]. Timecode: 34’55”-35’.

[15]. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Lowell Duckert, “Introduction: Eleven Principles of the Elements” in Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water and Fire (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), p. 6.

[16]. Shibaji Mridha, “Love as Water: Environmental Ethics in Ponyo and The Shape of Water.”, Crossings, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2022, p. 66.

[17]. Ibid., p. 67.

[18]. Ibid.

[19]. Ibid.

[20]. Cohen, Duckert, “Introduction: Eleven Principles of the Elements”, p. 2.

[21].  Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), p. 15-16.

[22]. Mridha, “Love as Water”, p. 73.

[23]. Ibid.

[24]. Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 2006 [1942]), p. 33.

[25]. Ibid.

[26]. Miyazaki, Turning Point, p. 423.

[27]. Lucy Fraser, “The Metamorphosis of Female Desire: Contemporary Japanese Imaginings of ‘The Little Mermaid’”, East Asian Forum, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2010, p. 30.

[28]. D’Aloia, “Film in Depth.”, p. 93-94.

FILMOGRAPHY

Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Netflix Streaming. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. 1984. Studio Ghibli. 2020.

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. Netflix Streaming. Directed by Hayao Miyazaki. 2008. Studio Ghibli. 2020.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bachelard, Gaston. Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter. Translated by Edith R. Farrell. Dallas: Pegasus Foundation, 2006 [1942].

Balsom, Erika. An Oceanic Feeling: Cinema and the Sea. New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, 2018.

Bennett, Jane. “Force of Things” in Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, 1-19. Durham; London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome & Duckert, Lowell. “Introduction: Eleven Principles of the Elements” in Elemental Ecocriticism: Thinking with Earth, Air, Water and Fire, 1-26. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015.

D’Aloia, Adriano. “Film in Depth. Water and Immersivity in the Contemporary Film Experience”. Film and Media Studies, Vol. 5 (2012): 87-106.

Daniel, Drew. The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance. New York: Fordham University Press, 2013.

Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987.

Descartes, René. A Discourse on The Method. Translated by Ian McLean. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006 [1637].

Fraser, Lucy. “The Metamorphosis of Female Desire: Contemporary Japanese Imaginings of ‘The Little Mermaid’”, 24-35. East Asian Forum, Vol. 13, No. 1, 2010.

Miyazaki, Hayao. Turning Point: 1997-2008. Translated by Beth Cary and Frederick L. Shodt. San Francisco: Viz Media, 2014.

Mridha, Shibaji, “Love as Water: Environmental Ethics in Ponyo and The Shape of Water.”. Crossings, Vol. 13, No. 2 (2022), 66-79.

Starosielski, Nicole. “Beyond fluidity: a cultural history of cinema underwater” Ecocinema Theory and Practice, edited by Stephen Rust, Salma Monani, and Sean Cubitt, 149-168. New York; London: Routledge, 2013.

Pictures ©Images of film. The original author takes all credit for these.