Ponyo (Opens August 14)

[BMan62]

Am I missing something or has no one mentioned the upcoming Hayao Miyazaki film "Ponyo" coming out under the Walt Disney Pictures organization? It arrives in theaters August 14th.

This guys films are incredible!!!!! They should be playing this up immensely!

[Mufasa]

Hayao Miyazaki will actually be the featured guest at the 2nd Marc Davis Celebration of Animation, hosted by John Lasseter on July 28th at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

Tickets sold out immediately (only $5 for the general public) for the event and if you managed to get tickets, I'd recommend getting there early as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tends to oversell these events and parking in the area is a nightmare so they sometimes turn people away even if they're holding tickets.

Ponyo is quite interesting in that it features so much beautiful hand-drawn animation with an emphasis on absolutely no CG. I know Studio Ghibli had experimented with blending CG with the hand-drawn animation in Howl's Moving Castle but towards the latter half of the film all the effects are done by hand and not CG.

For Ponyo, Miyazaki was very involved in the animation, choosing to personally hand animate the waves and the sea by himself and in the end I think they wound up with something like 170,000 total individual drawings created by 70 staff members in a period of about a year and a half for the finished film (that ratio of drawings and attention to details for a 100 minute animated film is unheard of and to do that on that time schedule is incredible).

[NotaGeek]

The film does look amazing! For anyone that wants to check out the info, go to:

The Official Ponyo Site (http://disneydvd.disney.go.com/ponyo.html) or
The Ponyo Yahoo! Site (http://movies.yahoo.com/movie/1809843003/info)

[IamBelle]

I loved Spirited Away, and Ponyo looks just as good. It said that is based on the Little Mermaid story, so that's cool. I will definitely be seeing this!

[Lynn J Mc]

I just heard about this yesterday when a local radio station was interviewing Billy Ray Cyrus. Evidently one of his children is voicing the main character.

[Marceline]

We just got back from seeing this film.....it was lovely!!:thumbsup: Very magical, very cute. I am so glad Disney is distributing wonderful anime in the US.

This film is perfect family fare, so sweet and funny, no big bad scary things......actually there is a general lack of evil all together. It's just pure innocent delight. Take your kids while it's still in theaters!!!:thumbsup:

:mickey: