CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 2/14/2026

Love, magic and alchemy in Hayao Miyazaki's 'Ponyo'

“Ponyo loves Sosuke! I will be a human, too!” So says the unforgettable titular goldfish-princess-turned-mischevious-girl of Hayao Miyazaki’s 2008 hand-drawn masterpiece, Ponyo. A surreal yet childlike adaptation of The Little Mermaid, Ponyo is both a love story and a tale of powerful female curiosity and self-confidence. This Japanese poster for the film is reproduced from Hayao Miyazaki, published by DelMonico Books and the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures on the occasion of the museum’s inaugural exhibition in 2021—and on our minds anew this Valentine’s weekend as the Academy Museum’s highly-anticipated Ponyo exhibition opens, at last, to the public. “Having used CGI in his previous three feature films, Miyazaki decided, with Ponyo, to return to hand-drawn animation and once more push its potential by rendering the shapes and movements of a fluid world ‘where magic and alchemy are accepted as part of the ordinary,’ curator Jessica Niebel writes. “Miyazaki instructed Ghibli’s creative team to ‘get rid of straight lines. Use gently warped lines that allow the possibility of magic to exist liberating us from the curse of perspective drawing.’ The singularity of Ponyo lies in its flowing organic lines, which express a world dynamic defined by the living presence of the sea, ‘where even the horizon swells, dips and sways.’”