Have you ever seen the movie Ponyo? According to Amazon.com

Ponyo is a magical celebration of innocent love and the fragile beauty of the natural world. The daughter of the sea goddess Gran Mamare (voiced by Cate Blanchett) and the alchemist Fujimoto (Liam Neeson), Ponyo (Noah Cyrus) begins life as an adventurous little goldfish. Chafing at her father’s restrictions, she goes in search of adventure and meets Sosuke (Frankie Jonas), a good-natured 5-year-old who lives by the sea. Sosuke adopts Ponyo and quickly wins her heart. Fujimoto uses magic to bring her back, but Ponyo’s love for Sosuke proves stronger than his elixirs. She transforms herself into a human girl and returns to him during a spectacular storm at sea, but her metamorphosis upsets the balance of nature, precipitating a crisis only Gran Mamare can resolve.

Josh rented Ponyo for Jude sometime last week. It was a great day for watching movies and eating popcorn; the sky was a gloomy shade of gray, it rained on and off all day, and the air was cool. I wasn’t super impressed with the film (though I LOVED the breastfeeding mom character and the conversation she had with Ponyo), but Jude just couldn’t get enough of “Ponyo Fish.” That, my friends, is when things got interesting.

On Friday, nearly a week after seeing Ponyo for the first (and second, and third, and possibly even fourth) time, I went for a run and then stopped at the park to chat with our neighbors. Jude came out a few minutes later armed with an empty yogurt container that held (apparently) his very own Ponyo Fish. He was v. v. excited about his little goldfish and quickly made friends with an older girl named Taylor who humored him in his pretend play.

Wait, saying that she “humored him” sounds a bit snotty, doesn’t it? Sorry about that. What I mean is, Jude ran up to this girl he had never met before and started chattering on and on about Ponyo Fish and water and a bucket, and this little girl just ate it up. She played with him for at least an hour. They filled the container with soup and beans (wood chips, dirt, rocks, and water) for Ponyo Fish to eat. They picked flowers for Ponyo. It was really fantastic to watch.

At least, I thought it was a fantastic sight. That was until Saturday afternoon when Jude and I headed out to the park, again with said yogurt container in hand, and I found out what fantastic really means. Due to a certain aligning of the stars, Taylor was there again, but this time SHE ran at Jude asking if he remembered her and playing Ponyo Fish with her the day before. And then they started playing “Ponyo Fish” all over again… except this time they had nine other kids playing with them as well. Somehow, after about an hour of playing, the game morphed into something else, and suddenly, Taylor and some of the bigger kids had fashioned “plates” for all the kids out of large leaves and a center piece out of some of the flowers they had found. They kids scooped handfuls of the “soup” they had made for Ponyo Fish onto the leaf plates and proceeded to have dinner (and then dessert) together. After the meal, Taylor directed the kids to their rooms (different places on the playground) so that they could go to bed.

And what might be the most amazing part of the whole story is that none of the parents there had to intervene, at all, during the two hours they kids were playing.