Ponyo / Battle for Terra

The first of these two animated family pictures is a charming hand-drawn Japanese spin on Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid , in which a female goldfish comes ashore and strikes up a friendship with Sosuke, the five-year-old son of a sea captain and a geriatric nurse. Behind the simple story is a fable about the interaction and symbiosis of land and sea, and while it isn't one of Studio Ghibli's best works, it's far superior to the American Battle for Terra , directed by Aristomenis Tsirbas, who worked as a visual effects artist on his fellow Canadian James Cameron's Titanic . The story of the survivors of a bankrupted earth trying to take over the ecologically balanced planet of some kindly extraterrestrials and having an earthling change sides to assist the oppressed is extremely close to that of Cameron's Avatar .