Liminal Shores, Agential Oceans
After being reminded of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Ponyo in Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies, I became interested in the liminal or transitional properties of the seashore in Ponyo and A Tale for the Time Being. At the beginning of Ponyo, a young boy named Sōsuke finds the titular character as a fish trapped in a glass jar near the seashore. He breaks her free, slightly cutting himself, and Ponyo licks his cut and begins her transmogrification from fish into chicken, into little human girl. Chen argues that, “The fish/chicken/little girl is far from a binary logic; she is a blending that is partial and contingent and enacted across time” (Chen 230). I think this “partial and contingent” character of Ponyo also speaks to the setting where her transformation begins, the seashore. In both works it appears as a place where transformations can occur as well as a site where serendipitous powers seem be at work. Ponyo’s washing ashore just as Sōsuke is nearby displays a similar contingency to that of Ruth finding Nao’s journal in A Tale for the Time Being. In both works, the liminal space of seashore seems …show more content…
The ocean’s agency is performed through fortuity or serendipity – this is related to the familiar ‘message in a bottle’ trope. The seashore becomes the contact point between the land, with its associated humanity, and an agential sea. We see this in Ruth’s very first musings on the ocean when she finds the plastic bag containing Nao’s journal on the beach: “The sea was always heaving things up and hurling them back” (Ozeki 9). This passage emphasizes the agentivity of the sea, as it is capable of the dual motion of bringing things up onto the shore as well as carrying them back out to open waters. This clearly relates to the tides but also evinces an active
After being reminded of Hayao Miyazaki’s film Ponyo in Mel Y. Chen’s Animacies, I became interested in the liminal or transitional properties of the seashore in Ponyo and A Tale for the Time Being. At the beginning of Ponyo, a young boy named Sōsuke finds the titular character as a fish trapped in a glass jar near the seashore. He breaks her free, slightly cutting himself, and Ponyo licks his cut and begins her transmogrification from fish into chicken, into little human girl. Chen argues that, “The fish/chicken/little girl is far from a binary logic; she is a blending that is partial and contingent and enacted across time” (Chen 230). I think this “partial and contingent” character of Ponyo also speaks to the setting where her transformation begins, the seashore. In both works it appears as a place where transformations can occur as well as a site where serendipitous powers seem be at work. Ponyo’s washing ashore just as Sōsuke is nearby displays a similar contingency to that of Ruth finding Nao’s journal in A Tale for the Time Being. In both works, the liminal space of seashore seems …show more content…
The ocean’s agency is performed through fortuity or serendipity – this is related to the familiar ‘message in a bottle’ trope. The seashore becomes the contact point between the land, with its associated humanity, and an agential sea. We see this in Ruth’s very first musings on the ocean when she finds the plastic bag containing Nao’s journal on the beach: “The sea was always heaving things up and hurling them back” (Ozeki 9). This passage emphasizes the agentivity of the sea, as it is capable of the dual motion of bringing things up onto the shore as well as carrying them back out to open waters. This clearly relates to the tides but also evinces an active