While Hurricane Gustav was chewing up Cuba and storming toward Louisiana, the screen of the Venice Film Festival’s Sala Grande was showing a very sweet tsunami. In the animated movie Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, the swelling waves take the form of dolphins, and when a Japanese coastal village gets submerged no one is killed or hurt — just amusingly displaced. The rising up of the marine world is not insurrection against humanity but gently cautionary instruction for it
