Blog Post 7

 For this Japanese video blog post, I'll be covering my viewing of Ponyo, one of my favorite Ghibli films, and an incredibly special one to me at that. It was my first Ghibli film, and perhaps anime, when I watched it for the first time as a child on my cousins' farm around early elementary school age. I have fond memories of watching it around the campfire on a projector screen, and I'm happy to say it was just as good all these years later, with the beautiful depictions of marine life and the majesty of the ocean still holding up. It follows the free-spirited Ponyo as she escapes her home in the sea and crosses paths with a boy named Sosuke, and all the ensuing chaos that follows as magical/supernatural forces are thrown out of balance.

This might've been my first time watching this movie with the original Japanese audio; however, since I am quite a fan of Studio Ghibli's high-quality English dubs. The voices were obviously slightly different from what I remembered, which gave the characters an almost different personality in my head as I was watching. I recognized the term "umi" plenty of times, as the ocean was a pivotal part of the film's plot, and other words (familial terms, time counters, basic nouns/verbs, etc), which was pretty neat! I want to learn more complex sentence structures and a wider variety of verbs so I can follow along closely with less lapses, and eventually be able to use it myself!