#mamarou

[quasarkwell]

My sister and I re-watched Ponyo last night. She absolutely went feral over Humbert von Gikkingen last week (who can blame her, honestly), and I thought she would like Fujimoto. So while I was getting the movie ready, I told her that she should get ready to have another favorite character. "You'd better not be talking about Ponyo's scummy dad," was her response.

I was a bit appalled. All the characters in Ponyo are great, but Fujimoto's so cool. He's a former human who loved the sea so much he couldn't forgive humans for polluting it. He married the Queen of the Sea and gave up his humanity for magic to serve nature. He's so fundamentally changed that he can't walk on dry land.

In his introduction, he even has a flashlight so he can talk to squid.

That alone tells me he's really good at his job.

And his design? Long red hair, the weird suit, the gold earrings, the magnificent bags under his eyes. It all screams "neurotic wizard".

He ends up as the antagonist because he knows how bad humans can be and is reluctant to trust them. I love the scene where he talks to Gran Mamare for the first time. We see that Fujimoto is incredibly reluctant to trust a human with the fate of his daughter, no matter how much his daughter likes that human. He becomes so distraught he starts to retreat into himself and Gran Mamare calms him down like this:

Fujimoto somewhat reluctantly helps his wife set up the test of love, and when it's over, he tells Sasuke, "I hope you will remember me kindly." He knows that even though he was doing his best, he failed. He isn't human anymore, but he's still fallible.

My sister did change her stance on him after this re-watch. Growing older allows us to see things in deeper color than black and white.

There is one thing he definitely got wrong, though: Brunhilde was a terrible name for Ponyo.

[gamerbearmira]

Obligatory Summer Festival Episode

FINISHES THE REDRAW LETS GOOOOO 🥸🥸

I did decide to add Mamorou too; because I. Didn't even attempt the background. Just imagine a summer festival in Japan 🌚

I did color it like I said tho 🤭🤭 notice how everyone's matching yukatas except Usagi. It's cool tho 😌

Usagi waited WEEKS to get Mirabel and Antonio's yukatas, got them mfs custom made 🤧

[boilingrain]

Caterpillar is too interesting of a character to be as forgotten about as he is in this fandom

[heliphantie]

Happy St. Valentine Day!

Have some thematic Ghibli fanart from 2022/2023.

[gatsby-system-folks]

Watched Ponyo again and cried

[snobgoblin]

I'll never understand how a giant shapeshifting goddess woman and a funky little wizard dude made these weird little fish stick creatures

[lepoppeta]

I personally don't really understand Tumblr's obsession with Ghibli movies. Or rather, I understand it, but I don't relate to it -- I never watched them during my truly formative years; I don't have strong feelings towards their aimless (although beautiful) nature or their seemingly intense focus on animating good (?) food.

I have seen exactly one Ghibli film to my name, and that's Ponyo. I caught it one afternoon during the summer holidays (I think I was in my early middle school years, so 11-12) when my family still paid for cable. I watched it all the way through and didn't understand like 95% of it.

However.

That one 5% did count for something.

It wasn't the food, it wasn't the innocent naivety of children, it wasn't the scenery or the animation or the music.

It was the one scene where Ponyo's mother and father (Fujimoto and Grand Mamare, I believe their names are?) meet, after I assume many years (I can remember Fujimoto, in Liam Neeson's very distinct voice, explicitly saying "It's been a long time, my love") and discuss their eldest daughter's desire to become human.

I can't pinpoint why exactly that one scene (and only that scene) sticks out in my memory. I know it wasn't a "lesbian awakening" or anything like that upon seeing a giant animated sea goddess. It wasn't because there was a subversion of traditional parental and gender roles, because even though there is I didn't think of that at the time at all.

Perhaps it simply is the fact that it's Liam Neeson's voice coming out of a twink ginger sea wizard when before that I had only known him as Aslan from Narnia, but now that I look at it...

... it's just a nice scene. Fujimoto is a ball of scruffy aquatic anxiety and his wife is open-minded and understanding despite the potential for consequence. He wears his heart on his pinstripe sleeves and worries all the time and it was so interesting watching him react to everything with such unguarded expressions. It's the fact that these two immortals haven't seen each other in so long and yet they speak to each other and hold each other so tenderly. Maybe this is what cemented my love for the soulmate trope? I'm not sure. It certainly is something I kind of look for in my ships on-and-off now that I'm older, even though I do it pretty subconsciously.

I dunno. It's just nice. I wish I could find that scene on YouTube.

[heliphantie]

"The sea, that's where we all came from."

July 19, 2008, Hayao Miyazaki's "Ponyo on The Cliff by The Sea" was released 15 years ago.