Ponyo - Production

Production

Hayao Miyazaki, the film's director and writer, said his inspiration was the Hans Christian Andersen story, "The Little Mermaid" but his inspiration was more abstract than a story. Along with animation director Katsuya Kondo and art director Noboru Yoshida, Miyazaki devised a set of goals which included to use traditional animation entirely in Ponyo, pursuing the animation and art possibilities without struggling under the demands of the production schedule, showing the quality of Yoshida's artwork as well as celebrating the innocence and cheerfulness of a child's universe. Production of Ponyo began in May 2006, while key animation of Ponyo began in October of that year.

Miyazaki was intimately involved with the hand-drawn animation in Ponyo. He preferred to draw the sea and waves himself, and enjoyed experimenting with how to express this important part of the film. The level of detailed drawing present in the film resulted in 170,000 separate images—a record for a Miyazaki film.

Ponyo's name is an onomatopoeia, based on Miyazaki's idea of what a "soft, squishy softness" sounds like when touched.

The seaside village where the story takes place is inspired by Tomonoura, a real town in Setonaikai National Park in Japan, where Miyazaki stayed in 2005. Some of the setting and story was affected by Richard Wagner's opera Die Walküre. The music also makes reference to Wagner's opera. The character of Sōsuke is based on Miyazaki's son Gorō Miyazaki when he was five. Sōsuke 's name is taken from the hero in the famous novel The Gate.

The name of the ship on which Sōsuke's father works is Koganeimaru, a reference to Studio Ghibli's location in Koganei, Tokyo. Maru (丸?) is a common ending for ship names.