From Little Mermaid to feral child: The rebellious trajectory of the wild girl in Hayao Miyazaki’s Ponyo

Hayao Miyazaki, the acclaimed Studio Ghibli director, has long been known for crafting complex portraits of women and girls in his films. Arguably, the most popular and compelling of these characters is Princess Mononoke’s self-determining San, a monstrous woman who has attracted scholarly attention in work from scholars like Rayna Denison. However, a more overlooked figure in Miyazaki’s pantheon of female characters is Ponyo, the ningyo star of the titular film who transforms into a human and causes a spectacular tsunami in Miyazaki’s reinterpretation of Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Little Mermaid’. In this sense, Ponyo is a fascinating re-evaluation of this fairy tale character, altered from a symbol of pubescent curiosity and feminine irresponsibility to a powerful figure that serves as a rare female example of the feral child in fiction (Brodski 2019). In doing this, Miyazaki transforms the character into a feminist symbol of girlhood joy and agency, diverging from conventional male depictions of feral children. This article examines the history of the fictional feral child and Ponyo’s deviation from this tradition, particularly in the context of animation and Ghibli’s own oeuvre. Utilizing narratological theories and aspects of adaptation studies, this work seeks to position Ponyo as an especially disruptive figure in the Ghibli canon, with a feminine trajectory all her own.