General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (Gake no ue no Ponyo, 崖の上のポニョ) is a 2008 Japanese animated fantasy film written, directed, and with an original story by Hayao Miyazaki, produced by Studio Ghibli and released in Japan by Toho on July 19, 2008.¹ It tells of a small fish girl who wants to become human after a boy named Sosuke rescues her, and of the flood her stolen magic unleashes on the human world.² The film finished as the No. 1 Japanese domestic box office release of 2008, and its theme song became a hit in its own right.²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	崖の上のポニョ (Gake no ue no Ponyo), English title Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea¹
Release	July 19, 2008 (Japan), distributed by Toho; running time 101 minutes¹
Core staff	Original story, screenplay, direction: Hayao Miyazaki; producer: Toshio Suzuki; music: Joe Hisaishi¹
Production method	No 3D CG; all movement drawn by animators, with digital paint, compositing, and assists such as mask animation³
Box office	No. 1 Japanese domestic film of 2008²
Festival	In competition at the 65th Venice International Film Festival; CIAK audience award, Mimmo Rotella Foundation award, and a Future Film Festival Digital Award special jury prize²
Voice cast	Tomoko Yamaguchi, Kazushige Nagashima, Yuki Amami, George Tokoro, Yuria Nara, Hiroki Doi, Rumi Hiiragi, Akiko Yano, Kazuko Yoshiyuki, Tomoko Naraoka¹

Spoilers

Story

Sosuke, a boy who lives in a house on a cliff, rescues a small fish girl named Ponyo who is stuck with her head inside a jar on the shore.² Wanting to stay with the boy she has come to love, Ponyo decides to become human, but her father Fujimoto forcibly returns her to the sea.² She steals her father's magic and escapes, running straight to Sosuke's house on the cliff; the powerful magic throws the human world into confusion and brings a great flood.²

A structural analysis of the film published in the Bulletin of the Folklore Society of Kyoto found that it is built from two shorter "otherworld visit" tales (ikyou-houmon-tan), a familiar Japanese story form, joined together through an inverted structure.⁴ A Korean-language study has also described the film as drawing its motifs from the Japanese folktale Urashima Taro and Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid.⁵

Production

Studio Ghibli and Toho announced the title on March 19, 2007, with a release planned for the summer of 2008; until that day the studio's website had referred to the project only as "next work."⁶

Hand-drawn animation with digital assists. The film is often noted for being drawn entirely by hand, and the production deliberately used no 3D CG: all work involving movement was carried out by animators in the traditional way.³ Digital tools still played a supporting role. Painting and compositing were done on computers, and digital processing was used to bring out light and shadow in ways that hand-drawn backgrounds and line art alone could not.³ Digital animation director Atsushi Okui described one technique, "mask animation," used to animate vegetation in storm scenes: trees and plants were drawn and painted like characters, then composited onto the background with color-plane masks so that details such as leaves turning white as they flip over could be added without the foliage looking pasted on.³ The backgrounds that define the film's world were conceived by Miyazaki together with art director Noboru Yoshida.³

Setting. Studio Ghibli rarely declares an official real-world setting for its films, but for Ponyo the harbor town of Tomonoura in Fukuyama, Hiroshima Prefecture, is widely mentioned; Miyazaki is said to have stayed in the district while developing the concept, and many backgrounds are generally recognized as effectively depicting it.⁷

Music. Joe Hisaishi composed the score and the theme song "Gake no ue no Ponyo," with lyrics by Katsuya Kondo and additional lyrics by Miyazaki, sung by Fujoka Fujimaki and Nozomi Ohashi; Masako Hayashi sang the other theme, "Umi no Okaasan" (Mother of the Sea), with lyrics by Wakako Kaku.⁸ The theme song became a hit alongside the film's box-office success.²

Release and reception

The film had its international premiere in competition at the 65th Venice International Film Festival in 2008, where it received the audience award chosen by the Italian film magazine CIAK, the Mimmo Rotella Foundation award, and a special jury prize in the Future Film Festival Digital Award.² It went on to record the highest Japanese domestic box office of any film released in Japan in 2008.²

Contemporary Japanese criticism emphasized the film's intensity rather than its plot. A review at the time of release described a girl running at full speed over raging waves to chase the boy she loves, and argued that the film privileges a compassionate, exalted cinematic world over conventional storytelling.⁹ Later commentary has noted that reactions divide between readers who enjoy the film's poetic looseness and those who find its second half and world-setting under-explained.¹⁰ Aggregated scores have remained strong: one compilation lists IMDb at 7.6/10, Rotten Tomatoes critics at 91 percent and audiences at 84 percent, and Metacritic at 86/100.¹¹

Home video

The Blu-ray edition, produced with Kichijiro Kashiwagi of the Panasonic Hollywood Laboratory, aimed to reproduce the softness of the hand-drawn imagery "without blurring," preserving fine linework and brush texture that DVD compression had softened; the resulting "Ponyo filter" was applied to the disc master.¹² A making-of release, Ponyo wa Kou Shite Umareta ("This Is How Ponyo Was Born"), a full-length version of the NHK Professional documentary that followed Miyazaki for about two and a half years of production, ran 752 minutes; its planned July 2009 release was postponed to December because of unresolved music rights processing between the producers and NHK Enterprises.¹³^•¹⁴

Place in Ghibli's history

Ponyo was directed by Miyazaki at age 67.¹⁵ When its production ended, Miyazaki announced a five-year plan, the first long-term schedule in the studio's history: new films by young directors in 2010 and 2011, followed by one of his own two years later. Under this plan, Hiromasa Yonebayashi, who had distinguished himself as a top animator on Ponyo, was chosen to direct Arrietty (released summer 2010) from Miyazaki's planning and screenplay.¹⁶^•¹⁵

The film's hand-drawn technique has remained a reference point: an exhibition at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, "Studio Ghibli's PONYO," focused on the film's traditional hand-drawn animation techniques.¹⁷

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026