Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

Alkhayat, Marwa (2025). Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea (2008): A cli-fi reading of Japanese anime. Japanese Studies, 45(1), 23-36.

"This article examines Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo as a visual flood narrative to explore a surreal aquatic ecosystem and a fantasy tsunami. A Cli-Fi (climate fiction) reading of Ponyo offers an interpretation of a magical watery world investigated within the apocalyptic paradigm of Miyazaki’s ‘imagination of disaster’. The inspiration for this research is the renowned Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh’s ecological call, in The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), to revive humanity’s kinship with its nonhumans in a highly creative fiction that addresses climate calamities. As such, this article attempts to establish Ponyo as a vibrant Japanese imagining of an environmental disaster in order to inspire action and provide an insightful answer to Ghosh’s ecological interrogation. Future academia will likely explore a convergence between humanities and animal studies to foreground new potentialities ‘reworlding’ tactics of hope and renewal."

Crombie, Zoe (2025). From Little Mermaid to feral child: The rebellious trajectory of the wild girl in Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo. Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook, 23, 137-149.

"Hayao Miyazaki, the acclaimed Studio Ghibli director, has long been known for crafting complex portraits of women and girls in his films. Arguably, the most popular and compelling of these characters is Princess Mononoke’s self-determining San, a monstrous woman who has attracted scholarly attention in work from scholars like Rayna Denison. However, a more overlooked figure in Miyazaki’s pantheon of female characters is Ponyo, the ningyo star of the titular film who transforms into a human and causes a spectacular tsunami in Miyazaki’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. In this sense, Ponyo is a fascinating re-evaluation of this fairy tale character, altered from a symbol of pubescent curiosity and feminine irresponsibility to a powerful figure that serves as a rare female example of the feral child in fiction (Brodski 2019). In doing this, Miyazaki transforms the character into a feminist symbol of girlhood joy and agency, diverging from conventional male depictions of feral children. This article examines the history of the fictional feral child and Ponyo’s deviation from this tradition, particularly in the context of animation and Ghibli’s own oeuvre. Utilizing narratological theories and aspects of adaptation studies, this work seeks to position Ponyo as an especially disruptive figure in the Ghibli canon, with a feminine trajectory all her own."

Wheeler, Colin. A kettle of fish on a warming planet: Exploring liminality in Ponyo and “The Little Mermaid”.
In Dominic J. Nardi & Keli Fancher (eds.). Studio Ghibli Films as Adaptations: Investigating How the Japanese Animation Powerhouse Reimagines Stories (pp. 34-54). New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Wilson, Bernard (2020). Mutilation, metamorphosis, transition, transcendence: Revisiting genderism and transgenderism in The Little Mermaid Through Gake no Ue no Ponyo.
In Bernard Wilson and Sharmani Patricia Gabriel (eds.). Asian Children’s Literature and Film in a Global Age: Local, National, and Transnational Trajectories (pp. 117-137). Singapore: Palgrave Macmillan.

Atherton, Cassandra (2017). “Put it back in the ocean. don’t you realize it’ll cause a tsunami?”: The power of wata no hara (the ocean plain) in Gake No Ue No Ponyo. Japan Studies Review, 21, 155-171.

Edwards, Kim (2014). Hidden depths: A Ponyo study guide. Screen Education, 74, 38-45.

"A charming, colourful film about innocent bonds between children, Ponyo is a perfect text for young primary students. Kim Edwards identifies the bountiful layers of meaning to be found within this touching story about a fish out of water."

Ross, Deborah (2014). Miyazaki's Little Mermaid: A goldfish out of water. Journal of Film and Video, 66(3), 18-30.

Bye, Susan. Two worlds colliding: Restoring balance in Hayao Miyazaki's 'Ponyo'. Screen Education, 71, 102-107.

"Hayao Miyazaki's Ponyo (originally titled Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, or Gake no ue no Ponyo, 2008) is a hand-drawn feature animation that explores the interrelationship between the natural world and human civilisation. Loosely based on Hans Christian Andersen's fairytale 'The Little Mermaid', Ponyo tells the story of a fish transformed by her love for a five-year-old human boy, Sosuke (Frankie Jonas). In reinterpreting the original story, Miyazaki draws on the Japanese Shinto-influenced animist tradition to imagine a fairytale ending in which the balance between nature and humanity is restored."

Birmingham, Elizabeth (2010). Celebrating magic's primordial ooze: Ponyo's close call with eco-pocalypse.
In Steven Rybin (ed.). Cinema and Globalization Dossier: Our Animated World. Florence: Jura Gentium.

Fraser, Lucy (2010). The metamorphosis of female desire: Contemporary Japanese imaginings of 'The Little Mermaid'. East Asia Forum, 13, 24-35.

"Acclaimed animator Miyazaki Hayao's Gake no lie no Ponyo (Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea), and manga (comic book) artist Watanabe Peco's Henshin monogatari (Tales of Metamorphosis) are both twenty-first century retellings of Hans Christian Andersen's classic 1837 fairy tale "The Little Mermaid." The popular story, which was translated into Japanese in 1904, is a powerful narrative of female desire, metamorphosis, silencing, and self-sacrifice. The film and manga both carefully position themselves as modernized adaptations of Andersen's moralizing text, presenting an opportunity to enquire into current understandings and representations of female desire and metamorphosis. In this paper I analyze these two Japanese revisions of a canonical Western fairy tale, examining their contemporary discourses around the power of women's desires, their relationships with metamorphosis, and the extent of their transformations over great cultural, geographical, and temporal distances.

 Lightburn, Jane (2010). Through the eyes of a child: Aspects of narrative in Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. Foreign Languages and Literature, 35(1), 97-114.