Tina Fey, Cartoon Mom
I don't think it would come as a surprise to anyone to learn that I'm fairly excited for Ponyo, Hayao Miyazaki's latest movie to make it over to the United States in an English translation. And I don't think it would surprise anyone to learn that I'm looking forward to Tina Fey's voice work in the movie. But I think the real reason I'm excited for Ponyo, which has a somewhat-incomprehensible-looking plot, and which, in trailers, doesn't look quite as visually inventive or transcendent as some of Miyazaki's other work, is that I'm excited to see the encounter between Fey and Miyazaki's conceptions of family.
Tina Fey's been working up to playing someone's mother for a long time. She's gone from the divorced teacher in Mean Girls, to the baby-kidnapping-hopeful-adoptive-parent on 30 Rock, to the women with the sketchy surrogate in Baby Mama, but she's always been just on the verge of motherhood. We've seen snatches of her and her daughter Alice in her American Express commercials. Motherhood is clearly important to Fey, both personally, and as an artistic theme, even though her own trajectory, and the characters she plays are touchstones for women who are smart, and funny, and career-oriented. One of the things I like about Fey is that she's always managed to portray motherhood as something that touches women deeply without suggesting that all women really want is to get pregnant, or dress their kids up in cutesy outfits. Motherhood, in Fey's work, is not something that is inconsistent with having a career. And so I'm excited to actually see Fey be a mom in a movie.
And I think Miyazaki's vision of parenthood will be an interesting frame for Fey's first significant role as a mother. My experience with Miyazaki's movies is that they're often about the frailty of parents: in My Neighbor Totoro, the children's mother is very ill, in Spirited Away, Chihiro's parents are easily tempted and turned into pigs as a result and Yubaba keeps her son in a kind of permanent infancy, and in Howl's Moving Castle, Sophie's father is dead and her mother spies against her, albeit under duress. The families in Princess Mononoke are ones that people make for themselves.
Fey's character in Ponyo looks much less compromised than the parents in other Miyazaki films. She's willing and able to accept the magical nature of her son's new friend, telling him "Life is mysterious and amazing," and moves to protect him when Ponyo's transformation from a fish into a girl sets off mysterious forces in the ocean. And there's definitely a sense that mothers are a major force, whether they're supernatural or human. "She's big and beautiful, but she can be very scary!" Ponyo says of her mother at one point in the trailer. "Sounds like my mom!" her friend replies. While Fey may not always portray or write potential mothers that way, that conception certainly seems to fit with her sense of the impact of motherhood.