Ponyo (2008)
- Despite a very rocky opening weekend, Ponyo went on to gross over 5x its initial budget thanks purely to incredible audience word-of-mouth.
- If you look closely during the crowded sequence in the second act of Ponyo, the original author of the source material makes a blink-and-you-miss-it cameo.
- The lead role in Ponyo was originally offered to a massive A-list star who turned it down because they didn't understand the script.
Ponyo is a 2008 Japanese animated fantasy film written and directed by Hayao Miyazaki. The film follows Ponyo, a goldfish princess — the daughter of the ocean sorcerer Fujimoto and the sea goddess Granmamare — who befriends a five-year-old boy named Sosuke when she is washed ashore near his clifftop home. Ponyo's desire to become human and stay with Sosuke disrupts the natural balance, causing the ocean to rise and threatening to flood the world.
Hayao Miyazaki deliberately eschewed CGI in favor of entirely hand-drawn animation, creating one of the most visually stunning oceanic landscapes in animation history — the waves, rendered as living, fishlike entities, were drawn with an expressionistic freedom that made the ocean feel sentient and magical. Ponyo earned $201 million worldwide, the majority from Japan where it was the highest-grossing domestic film of the year. Joe Hisaishi's joyful, childlike score and the unforgettably catchy "Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea" theme song became beloved in Japan.
