With simulated waves, animation tables and dozens of original sketches on display, a new exhibition in the Oscars museum offers immersion into the aquatic world of Ponyo, animator Hayao Miyazaki’s cinematic classic.
The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures opened in 2021 with a retrospective dedicated to the grand master of Japanese animation.
Nearly five years later, dozens of drawings, storyboards and other elements created for the film and gifted to the Los Angeles institution by Miyazaki’s world-famous Studio Ghibli are going on display.
Photo: Valerie Macon, AFP
“It’s such a treasure to have, we should share it with our visitors,” exhibition curator Jessica Niebel said.
The museum has dedicated more than 350m2 to the magical 2008 movie.
Inspired by the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Little Mermaid, Miyazaki’s story centers around a goldfish with a girl’s face who is rescued by a five-year-old boy, Sosuke. Despite the reluctance of her father, the underwater wizard Fujimoto, little Ponyo falls in love with her new friend and gives up her magical powers to become human.
Entirely hand drawn, the film was hailed as a visual masterpiece marking Miyazaki’s return to the traditional animation of his early career, after incorporating computer generated images in Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle.
“What’s really special about Ponyo is he instructed his team right from the beginning that everything in this movie needs to move,” Niebel said, recalling how the artists created a lush aquatic world, with swirling colors underwater and waves that shifted with the weather.
Animation enthusiasts would find sketches of some of the film’s key sequences, drawn in pencil, and projections of its most majestic moments.
The immersive exhibition is above all “geared towards children,” the film’s primary audience, Niebel said.
Younger kids can romp around on rolling blue installations that mimic waves, slide a Ponyo figure across an ocean wall, or hide in a replica of Sosuke’s green bucket which he used to collect goldfish.
Children and their parents are urged to sit at animation tables to position sharks, jellyfish and crabs, and take photos frame by frame to create their own animated sequence — all under the benevolent eyes of the film’s elders at a retirement home threatened by rising waters.
Niebel said she hoped the exhibit might “invite the younger generation to maybe think about becoming a filmmaker” or a creative artist.
The exhibit opened yesterday and is to run until January next year.
Admission is free for children younger than 17.
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