Jul 19,2008
The son of a sailor, 5-year old Sosuke lives a quiet life on an oceanside cliff with his mother Lisa. One fateful day, he finds a beautiful goldfish trapped in a bottle on the beach and upon rescuing her, names her Ponyo. But she is no ordinary goldfish. The daughter of a masterful wizard and a sea goddess, Ponyo uses her father's magic to transform herself into a young girl and quickly falls in love with Sosuke, but the use of such powerful sorcery causes a dangerous imbalance in the world. As the moon steadily draws nearer to the earth and Ponyo's father sends the ocean's mighty waves to find his daughter, the two children embark on an adventure of a lifetime to save the world and fulfill Ponyo's dreams of becoming human.
nudity | None. |
violence | A woman drives her son along the highway at the edge of the sea during a storm; she drives recklessly, the car skids to a stop and she and her little boy exit, but the wind blows the boy over the rail and toward the sea (he is caught). A mother and small boy in a car nearly run head-on into a van on a narrow winding road. A five-year-old boy uses matches to light a candle three times and burns his finger once and yells "Ouch!" A mother leaves her 5-year-old son and his same-aged female playmate home alone late at night and the boy becomes afraid when the mom does not return. A boy and girl (both 5 years old) walk through a long, dark tunnel and halfway through she begins to turn into a fish and collapses; the boy cries, and carries her out to the shoreline, and he dunks her in the water to revive her (she awakens). Several short scenes feature family arguments: A husband and his wife argue over the phone and by signal beacon, and she slams the phone down and later slams a pot of greens into a sink. A girl-fish argues several times with her human father about living on land and he locks her in a bubble; she escapes, and this is repeated three times. An old woman in a nursing home screams when a little boy shows her a goldfish with the face of a little girl; the old woman screams that it is bad luck and the fish must go back to the sea. Several scenes depict dark-blue, big-eyed water blobs that grumble: They lap up onto a shoreline and snatch back a girl-fish after she tries to swim away, they splash up onto the shore to drive back a little boy, who looks frightened, and they search for the girl-fish several times, they grumble and gather together to form a wall to lift a man up and onto an island but fail and fall back into the sea, and in a few other scenes they swim pass ships at sea and shake them. Huge sea-blue fish escape from an underwater aquarium and rise to the surface to become waves that churn up a typhoon and rain; a small girl runs along their backs, but is not injured. In one scene the girl rubs her head on a baby's forehead to heal it, leaving faint red ovals on his forehead and cheeks. During the healing, her fingers and toes change from 5 digits to 3 fingers and toes on each limb; afterward, she has 5 digits on each limb again. A small fish licks a drop of blood we see on a boy's thumb, instantly healing a small cut we cannot see. Several schools of giant fish accidentally break though the door of a vault and are caught in a potion in a stone basin that causes the fish to fly upward. Two shore scenes feature hundreds of insects in the foreground. |
profanity | 17 mild obscenities ("bug off!"), 3 stereotypical comments about humans as naturally destructive, 3 religious exclamations. Name-calling (freak show, weird, human, ugly.) |
alcohol | A character opens a beer can which overflows. Alcohol is not consumed. A male human-looking character under the sea drinks elixirs from four tall bottles and from a fifth he pours a glowing golden potion and when he drinks the last drops from the bottle, he states, "I can feel the power of it down into my DNA." |
frightening | There's little violence, although a few scenes during and after a climactic storm may be intense. Some scenes in which characters seem to be missing might also be upsetting. MPAA/USA - Rated G. BBFC/UK - Rated U (very mild threat). |