YMMV / Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea

• Accidental Innuendo: "I'd let a fish lick me if it'd get me outta this wheelchair."
• Americans Hate Tingle: Ponyo herself is pretty divisive to American audiences, due to her occasional gross-out nature and oddities throughout.
• Angst? What Angst?: Every single character seems remarkably nonchalant about a catastrophic flood.
• Awesome Art: To be expected of a Studio Ghibli production, of course, but Ponyo is particularly notable in that none of the film was animated with CGI; it's entirely hand-drawn, making the animation that much more impressive.
• Base-Breaking Character: The title character herself Ponyo is this, especially in America where much of her behavior that is meant to be cute can come off more as creepy and gross. Even in Japan though she is rather divisive, with many feeling she an unsympathetic and selfish character who endangers a lot of people (albeit unintentionally) with her actions.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Ponyo's stare-off with the baby. It's random.
• Comedy Ghetto: While the film is not downright hated, it has received flak from even Ghibli fans for its very lighthearted and breezy tone, and how it mostly lacks the personal drama that helped to make Miyazaki's previous slice of life films, such as My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service, beloved classics. It was also completely snubbed by the Academy Awards, unlike Miyazaki's previous and more serious films, Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle, likely as a result of this.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Fujimoto. Despite (or even because of) the fact that he's a henpecked, crotchety, and overprotective father, two-thirds of the small but growing fanwork base involves him. It helps that he's voiced by Liam Neeson in the American dub.
• Faux Symbolism: A little girl who happens to be the daughter of a deity, running across the water.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • This anime film by Hayao Miyazaki based loosely on Hans Christian Andersen's Tear Jerker Fairy Tale The Little Mermaid was apparently popular in Denmark enough due to the fact that Denmark simply gave it its own Official Website.
  • It is also popular in the United States, and seems to be a common movie choice for parents of preschool-aged children. It helps that the English dub was co-produced with Pixar and Lucasfilm, including future Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy.
• Inferred Holocaust: Let's hope that the moon being a direct cause of the massive flood has no impact on the billions of lives across the world, or set humanity back by centuries due to water being detrimental to most technology.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • The film's ending shot of Human!Ponyo staring at Sosuke directly in the face. There have been countless altered versions of this image.
  • The pose Ponyo makes when she runs across the waves.
  • "Respect your father!"
  • "Teeth!"
  • "HAM!"
  • The "Ponyo loves" fancomic, which has been cloned into many other fandoms. In it a character talks about the people and things they love in an animated fashion, only to get a serious face when introduced to an antagonistic/oppressive character and express their love of revolution.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Ponyo's voice is absolutely adorable, especially when she's speaking for the first time ("Ponyo... love... Sosuke!").
• Narm:
  • Ponyo assaulting The Baby's face, The Baby's voice, talking about making milk for The Baby...
  • The dubbed ending song, both the normal and the remixed version.
• Narm Charm: Both of the above are almost fitting due to how the movie tends to run on child logic.
• Retroactive Recognition: Noah Cyrus voices Ponyo in the English dub.
• Squick: Ponyo occasionally engages in squicky behavior, like when she spits dirty water on Kumiko's dress and snuggles a baby's face while his nose is running.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: When Ponyo and her sisters break out of their tank, the music is earily similar to "Ride of the Valkyries", down to the composition. This is likely a reference to Ponyo (and maybe her sisters as well) being named after the most famous of the Valkyries, Brunhilde.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Ponyo is easily Studio Ghibli's most feel-good movie with especially whimsical moments and an incredibly warm ending.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Granmanmare evokes this due to her design being slightly more realistic than the traditionally Miyazaki-esque characters that surround her. Also, Ponyo's inbetween human-and-fish form.
• Values Dissonance: A mother leaves her five-year-old son alone in a typhoon in favor of taking supplies to the elderly women in the old folks home she works at. This looks like child neglect from a Western perspective, suggesting the woman is a bad mother. Japanese culture prides itself on dedication to one's workplace and caring for one's elders, while the Western perspective would likely encourage a parent to prioritize their child's welfare over their job or the elderly if the choice needed to be made between the two.
• Viewer Gender Confusion:
  • Ponyo, when we first see her. As the movie poster demonstrates, she starts out a human-like but androgynous fish with nothing communicating her gender.
  • Fujimoto. Some viewers weren't sure of his gender until he spoke his first lines.
  • The baby that Ponyo meets has an unknown gender, although the English dub refers to the baby with male pronouns.

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