None of this means it’s very good—or necessarily worth $14 and change. The difference between Tron: Legacy and its 1982 prequel hearkened me back to a tiff I once got myself into upon claiming that the effects in Star Trek were inferior to those in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Maybe the thought is native only to quixotic turns of mind, but the more realistic special effects get—the more pliable they become, the more densely packed the pixels around the digital helix—the less they seem to me, well, “special.” In C.E.3.K., the flying saucers scintillated like Christmas lights wrapping invisible trees; they were the gods’ magisterial chariots, earthbound constellations, self-illuminating nebulae: Obscurity lent to their mystery. Star Trek just played Hacky Sack with the camera, in space and on set. Laid athwart the graphics of a rogue Atari game, Tron had a Piet Mondrian austerity; the fractal patterns, bursting forth from reams of Day-Glo graph paper, were really unreal and truly unique—a contrast to the punk pastiche of Blade Runner, which came out that same sci-fi boon year. Tron: Legacy, with its Regency dining rooms and L.E.D. lounges, is more grounded in reality and too heady with neon pop pastiche. The ligne clare style of its predecessor is but one aesthetic bug caught in this virtual spider web. Even Daft Punk’s vaunted techno isn’t quite daft or punk enough. I wish they’d friended Trent Reznor; it’s too much of a movie score.

Between Avatar and Inception and Scott Pilgrim and now this, there’s been much ado about the fusion of cinema with video games—that is, much ado about nothing. There’s been an incestuous relationship between the two since the latter was in its infancy; as soon as Star Wars came out, heralding simplistic quest stories and spiffy visuals as all the rage, the film industry pounced on the burgeoning form like a creepy uncle. An ancillary market was born—even if the horny union was more like onanism than marriage. Movies were dumbed down so that they could be resold as video games; and, as their graphics developed, video games began to assume the styles and techniques of movies. I don’t think that filmmakers inspired by video games are adding much to the art of film; they’re just cramming into movies the crap that video games have already borrowed—they’re making movies even more jejune and reductive. Taken on its own, gaming can be a blast—it can even have salutary consequences. But, as Inception demonstrated, the brainpower that video games export to celluloid is only artificial intelligence.

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.

In the not-too-distant future, Earth’s “clean” energy is mined on the lunar surface. The mines require only one overseer, who’s secluded on our satellite for three years; communications to and from Earth must be prerecorded, so his only face-to-face companion is a mobile computer called GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey), whose operating system is half-HAL-9000 and half-WALL-E. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is finishing up his three-year contract as the movie opens. Homesick, he’s grown a grizzly beard and is surly with his programmed pal; he takes solace in videos from his family, and in making a paper model of his home town. But his reminisces get the best of him: He sees a mirage of his wife (Dominique McElligott) while driving in his lunar rover, and accidentally crashes into a giant thrasher. We then see Sam awakened by GERTY back on the station and forbidden to leave; but Sam seems to have an intuition, goes out to the thrasher, and discovers himself to be in the wreckage, as well.

If this passage seems a little hard to follow, it’s because there are now two Sams perambulating about the base. (If you don’t want to know why, you may not want to read on.) GERTY is invariably shady when the Sams question him about this, and, at first, the Sams can’t get much out of each other; they behave like one of the more unfortunate pairings forged through Craigslist. The “new” Sam thinks they’re both clones, and the old one concedes that their lives, memories, and destinies are all a sham; like the crew of the Nostromo in Alien, they are secondary to corporate directives. Eventually, they seek ways to return “home”—that is, to Earth—before a repair crew arrives at the base and discovers them both there. The Sams question their humanity and authenticity, but mature before our eyes. Like the vivacious replicants in Blade Runner, old Sam seems to be reaching his expiration date; new Sam starts out brutal and impatient, but learns to respect his fellow self.

Moon runs the old what-is-it-to-be-human jag, but does so at full gallop. Fancy bouts of pontification are disposed of without detriment to the movie; the screenwriter, Nathan Parker, keeps the dialogue ever fluid and never dripping with significance. Unlike cousin HAL, GERTY—by way of Spacey’s smarmy-smooth diction—is ultimately humane, but this revelation is never lingered on. The ambiguous little smiley faces that GERTY expresses himself with are enough to make the complexity of his “humanness” clear. But, despite such touches, which make this a shimmering crescent-moon of a picture, Jones’s conception hasn’t entirely waxed.

Moon was released a few weeks short of the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, but its enthusiasm for space travel seems to have been jettisoned at takeoff. To my thinking, this broad pessimism is a tad regrettable; fortunately, it is not Jones’s focus. His eyes are more earthbound—toward people (or their equivalents), not planets. While there’s certainly nothing wrong with that viewpoint, it does make the movie seem limited in scope: Even when a feeling for cosmic wanderlust is absent, the cold beauty of outer space can be expressed no more vividly than on a wide silver screen. Someone once remarked to me that certain things are beautiful only when one is sad; in Moon, the loneliness and sorrow could be measured in light-years, but Gary Shaw’s cinematography looks clinical and cramped. It’s always adequate, and sometimes pretty, but never quite worthy of either the heavens above or Rockwell’s mere mortal below. Jones appears to be more of a humanist than Kubrick, but Kubrick’s command of the medium is, as yet, far greater than Jones’s. This shortcoming may seem superficial, but it has the potential to make Moon seem smaller than it is—and easily eclipsed.

But, despite some pictorial deficiencies, Jones’s direction is strong when the situation becomes tense, and his unusually judicious cutting (the film is only one hour and 37 minutes long) unleashes the fertile ideas poetically but efficiently; Moon’s lack of wonder may also be its lack of ponderousness. (In most movies of this sort, such as parts of Danny Boyle’s Sunshine, wonder and ponderousness are entangled.) Jones’s ideas speak for themselves, and so do his actors—and the fact that there are so few of them makes Moon’s ability to hold our attention even more remarkable.

Like Michael Cera, Rockwell is an actor whose nervousness makes him likable and worth rooting for. But Rockwell’s tweakier than Cera. Both actors emote melancholy proficiently, but Cera’s (at this stage of his career) is always easily resolved. Rockwell’s antsiness is never resolved; his characters—such as the coked-up paranoiac in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, or half-wit brother of Robert Ford in the mythic Assassination of Jesse James, or impotent historian-activist in Frost/Nixon—never seem quite capable of taking care of themselves, and this makes one genuinely uneasy for him. Sam is no heroic Buzz Lightyear stationed on Moon; he’s scuzzy like the space truckers feasted on by Alien. But Rockwell gets to have it both ways, and pulls it off. He’s both the sickly, weary clone who’s collapsing like an addict in withdrawal and the fresh replacement who jogs, gets into fights, and needs Aviators when extracted from his synthetic womb. He’s playing the same man at different stages of a short life: It’s a compressed Benjamin Button stint, but achieved without the luxury of computerized makeup.

As A.O. Scott cleverly surmises, Jones “is no doubt tired of reading that his father is David Bowie,” but one can’t help but compare the introverted, fastidious elegance of Moon with the intergalactic intrigue of Ziggy Stardust. Both have their place. But Moon suggests “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Ray Bradbury’s Martian chronicle that told of domestic machinery going about its tasks long after an A-bomb wiped out those it had served. Bowie makes you want to visit outer space; Jones makes you happy you’re stuck on Earth.