text: Gake no Ue no Ponyo is a beautifully animated film and a relief from the many heartless soulless CGI movies being made. The pastel and color pencil backgrounds were a surprise after Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi(Spirited Away) and Hauru no Ugoku Shiro(Howl's Moving Castle) being so similar stylistically. The style worked well for the film and was done exceptionally well. The time and effort put in to animate this is greatly appreciated as it gives the characters so much more life, the detail and care it takes makes the movie turn out so much better. There are several great scenes throughout the movie that have lots of movement and action. The greatest to me being a scene were Ponyo's sisters transform into massive wave like fish while she runs on top of them. The story is simple but fairly well written and played out. The plot stayed focused around character relationships and while it wasn't played out as well as in Tonari no Totoro(My Neighbor Totoro) it is still great. I felt that each character had the an appropriate amount of screen time unlike Spirited Away which was so jammed with distinctive characters that it could have been stretched out into an entire series.(The Radish Spirit. There was a another whole movie right there!) My only real problem with the movie was the end. The way its worded in the English version at least makes it seem like there's going to be some great test given to Sōsuke which turns out to be just him promising Ponyos mother that he will love Ponyo. Though putting more thought into this leads me to think that translation may not be that accurate to the actual meaning in that the test is the promise and that deep down he really means it. The movie did seem to end abruptly though. Other than that the movie was great and I highly recommend it.