Escaping the balmy summer heat in an air-conditioned theater playing Ponyo is like taking an epistemic holiday. Arguably, I suppose, one could say that about many movies―particularly foreign ones―and that’s certainly one of the medium’s charms; but rarely are movies as breezily surreal as this animated import by Hayao Miyazaki. The setting is not far removed from modern life, so the film’s nonchalance about the supernatural is itself supernatural. Ponyo has its own idiom, but if you retain an ear for the dialect of childhood reverie, and don’t mind sporting rose-tinted spectacles for 110 minutes, you’ll assent to its gentle absurdity as you would an imaginative kid’s make-believe. Sure, you’ll giggle at its insanity―or may, in vain, cling on to your own “sanity” by reducing the film’s innocence to dirty little jokes. But even my lewdest responses were derision-free: Miyazaki’s magic realism has a bonkers integrity. It passively defies one’s cynicism―with a beaming smile.

The title refers to this fairy tale’s spunky princess: a froglike Little Mermaid who washes ashore on the beach-front property of five-year-old Sosuke—voiced by Frankie Jonas. (Yes, Jonas. Disney co-produced and distributed the film, but voice-over casting is the only spot the white glove seems to have touched.) Sosuke looks after and loves his pet whatever-she-is; Ponyo loves him, too, and to his surprise, tells him so. The catch is that her father, Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), does not condone of human boyfriends. In fact, it’s Fujimoto’s job to usher in a new geochronological epoch that’ll put an end to our rotten race. He eventually gets his daughter back, but Ponyo (Noah Lindsey Cyrus—another dash of Disney) uses magic inherited from her effulgent-nymph mother (Cate Blanchett) to sprout legs, metamorphose into a little girl, and return to her beloved.

After their reunion, though, the plot balances on a wobbly fulcrum―a seesaw that has to be balanced out by the purity and verity of Sosuke’s love. In narrative terms, Ponyo devolves into a picaresque. Miyazaki’s vision is so gentle that the dramatic tension goes kerplunk; even the forces of nature are on the lovers’ side. But though it’s flabby, fat floats. The movie has a chill driftwood rhythm, and its equability prevents the fairy tale from getting schmaltzy. Even offbeat Hollywood fairy tales (like Up) are wont to meander down familiar, if agreeable, streams; the plot mechanics are so minimal in Ponyo that it appears to have been made by hospitable stoners for whom a whirling a zoetrope is as exciting as impending armageddon.

Not that Miyazaki and his associates are lazy, or have any illegal habits that I could attest to, but their movie plays like Jim Jarmusch in Wonderland―filigreed deadpan innocent of its own inertia. It’s Western mythology infused with Eastern serenity. Adults with Western tastes may become impatient; not all magic realism is tolerable to me, either. I found the book Pinocchio tedious because the author seemed to distribute voice boxes to animals only if his doing so was convenient to the plot. Its statically naughty marionette palled on me, too. Ponyo and Sosuke may be statically nice, but seem independent of any preordained, didactic plot; following their exploits is as relaxing as a float down a lazy river.

The drawback of all this is that Ponyo probably won’t impact one’s emotional memory to the extent that certain sequences from The Fall or Close Encounters of the Third Kind―or more sprawling Miyzaki cartoons like Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and Nausicaä―do. Even the animation in Ponyo is surprisingly modest: accomplished, but old-fashioned in a way that’s both refreshing and a touch banal. Yet there are wonderful strokes like Ponyo surfing on waves that are half-water and half-fish; or batty old matrons (played by such idiosyncratic luminaries as Betty White, Lily Tomlin, and Cloris Leachman) who resemble Hokusai sketches; or Sosuke’s alpha-male, beer-guzzling, volatile mother (Tina Fey!), who might be the worst movie driver since Annie Hall; or Fujimoto the foppish fashionista, who may hold Poseidon’s job, but dresses somewhere between Captain Nemo, Nosferatu and a steam-punk David Bowie. (His glam-rocker makeup must be waterproof; no matter how much seawater hits it, it never so much as smudges.)

Ponyo compensates for its listlessness with an atmosphere of affable absurdity. It doesn’t work up adults with winks and nudges of dick-joke Shrek-ery; it seems a kiddie movie by default because that’s the language Miyazaki is demonstrably fluent in. In his blending of real and surreal, he seems to be surfing a Haruki Murakami wavelength, but the weird doesn’t feel so sophisticatedly, consciously weird as it does in Murakami―who writes for grown-ups. Sosuke’s town turns Atlantis and its citizens drift about in rowboats with smiles as broad as oars. When Sosuke’s mother realizes that her son’s girlfriend is an incarnation of his erstwhile goldfish, she invites her in for tea; when Sosuke asks her if she thinks that Ponyo came from far away, his mother says, “Yeah.”

Although Miyazaki is revered by some as a great master in the same way that Tim Burton is, I fear saying too much and bloating Ponyo―it has a special charm, but its tricks are for kids. I’d be doing the film as much a service as a disservice by drowning it in accolades and exaggerating its depth. But it might be a tribute to the movie’s spirit that a shaggy-haired patron seated in front of me took tokes from his peace-pipe while it played, and not a single protest was lodged by an audience full of tots and their ’rents.