Assignment 16 - Angela Tseng

My absolute favorite movie director has to be Hayao Miyazaki. Ever since I was a child I watched his animated films such as Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke and Howl's Moving Castle, and even as I grew up I simply fell more in love with his movies and kept up with his new ones. The two movies that I'll be comparing for the sake of this assignment are Ponyo and Spirited Away. Despite the fact that I can still say that I enjoy all of Miyazaki's movies, Ponyo was one of my least favorite because, at least at the time that I watched it, it didn't seem to have much of a meaningful storyline to it and rather it was just a semi-random sequence of events. On the other hand, Spirited Away had a deep storyline that led to the development of the main character, Chihiro. However both of them have the linking factor of the being very fiction-ous. In Ponyo, one of the main characters, Ponyo herself, is a half human half fish hybrid whose mother rules the sea while in Spirited Away Chihiro runs across and is forced to work in a bath house for spirits to save her parents.