Hayao Miyazaki brings his signature joy and magic to Ponyo. All images courtesy of Walt Disney Pictures. © Nibariki-GNDHDDT.

View trailers and clips from Hayao Miyazaki's latest, Ponyo!

It's not often that the great Hayao Miyazaki comes to town in support of his films. Although he came to L.A. when the English-language version of Spirited Away was released, he refused to attend the Academy Awards to collect his Oscar in protest of the Iraq war. But John Lasseter, Kathleen Kennedy, Frank Marshall and Disney as a whole are pulling out all the stops to ensure the greatest possible box office success for the English-language version of Ponyo (opening today). They're launching the Hans Christian Andersen-inspired fable on 927 screens: the largest rollout ever for Miyazaki in this country.

Not surprisingly, the reviews have been glowing. Ponyo arguably skews younger than previous Miyazaki films and has a simpler design, but it succeeds in enchanting young and old alike. It is the tale of a magical goldfish (voiced by Noah Cyrus) that wishes to break free from her overbearing, wizard of a father (voiced by Liam Neeson), and become human to maintain a friendship with a five-year-old boy (Frankie Jonas) in a nearby seaside village. Although he has loving parents (Tina Fey and Matt Damon) his father is rarely home so they have their own issues to work out.

Last month Miyazaki made his first trip to Comic-Con in San Diego before holding a press conference with Lasseter in Beverly Hills and then getting feted later that evening at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences: chatting for a couple of hours with the chief creative officer of Walt Disney and Pixar Animation Studios.

The following is an edited transcript of the press conference; the second part will be a recap of "The Marc Davis Celebration of Animation: Hayao Miyazaki."

AWN: How do come up with your worlds?

Hayao Miyazaki: I do all my work on storyboard, so as I draw my storyboard, the world gets more and more complex. And as a result, my north, south, east, west sense of direction kind of shift and go off base. But it seems like my staff as well as the audience don't quite realize that this is happening. Don't tell them about it.

AWN: How important is it to get elements [about preserving the environment] into your films?

HM: The most important thing is, I think, that even within such an environment, children grow up, they learn to love and they enjoy living in that environment.

AWN: What was the original inspiration for Ponyo?

HM: I think John Lasseter knows as well, but it's really hard to explain what becomes the motivation or the instigation to do a film. I feel like I'm searching in my subconscious with a fishing net and I happened upon catching a goldfish in that net and that was the inspiration for starting to make this movie.

AWN: What have been some of the influences throughout your career?

HM: There are many, many people so I can't give all their names. And I forget their names. So I can't really tell you.

AWN: John, how difficult was it to getting the script, getting the dialogue to coordinate with the voice movements already done and then getting the [appropriate] voice talent?

John Lasseter: One of the biggest challenges in taking and creating the English language versions of Miyazaki sans' films… is that I don't want the English versions to change anything in [his] story. The first thing we do is get a direct translation. Even though the sentences will be hard to understand, I just want to know exactly what's being said. And then I work with Steve Alpert at Studio Ghibli and we'll rearrange the words to fit into sentences. And that's our starting place. And, in this case, we worked with Melissa Mathison, the brilliant screenwriter, and Kathy and Frank, the co-executive producers with me, and we'll sit down to discuss every step of the way what we want to do with this. And the goal is to make the [language] for American audiences to be very natural -- you don't think of this as being a dubbed Japanese film. We want everyone to just swept away with this story. However, there are some things that Japanese audiences will understand visually that American audiences won't. And in those cases, what I strive to do is make sure that the American audience will be at the exact same level of understanding at any one time in the movie that a Japanese audience would be. And sometimes that's a bit of a challenge. An obvious example of that was on Spirited Away when the main character was exploring the village and looks at this building. All Japanese audiences would know right away that it's a bath house. But no one in this country would know… so we just added a little line.