On movie fans, plush toy lovers and anime as art

It's a fish, it's a stuffed toy...

...It's a Ponyo plush!

Maybe I'm just plain lucky... but while more than one friend here in Hong Kong has lamented to me that there are few fellow movie fans to talk to at work, I have had no such problem both at my previous and present place of employment. As an added bonus, I also have a fair few colleagues who are likely to gasp and oooh and aaaah when presented with the sight of such as the Ponyo plush I bought from a street vendor for HK$20 (~US$2.50) a couple of days ago and took to the office to use as a stress-busting device today.

About the only colleague who had negative reactions to the sight of my little Ponyo was an Englishwoman who only moved to Hong Kong a few months ago. Like another European friend, she's been shocked to find that in this part of the world, the kawaii like of Hello Kitty and co have fans among adults as well as children, and males as well as females.

When Ponyo On the Cliff By the Sea played in cinemas here, I managed to persuade that same European friend to take in a screening of the film with me. Still, minutes before we entered the theatre at the Broadway Cinematheque, she felt compelled to talk about how she couldn't quite believe that she was going to be viewing what she labelled as "a children's movie".

In the theatre, before the lights went off, I enquired whether she could see any children in the audience. As she looked around, she realized that there wasn't a single child in the theatre that evening. And that, instead, every single person taking in the Ponyo screening was, in fact, an adult. (And, also and not coincidentally, Asian.)

There is a school of thought which posits that anime comes out of an artistic tradition that stretches back to the Japanese woodcut tradition that counts the great Hokusai among its members. Another school of thought has it that anime came about -- or became particularly popular -- in Japan at a time when the country was in an impoverished state and its filmmakers craved to exercise their imagination and create science-fiction and fantasy films but lacked the budget to do so.

In any event, two things became clear to my European friend post watching Ponyo. Firstly, anime -- even kawaii anime -- isn't just for children. And secondly, it really isn't all that far-fetched to consider anime to be art. Especially anime that comes courtesy of the genius that is Hayao Miyazaki and his Studio Ghibli (and which boasts enchanting music courtesy of composer Joe Hisaishi)!