Miyazaki brings hand-drawn Ponyo to the US

In the high-tech equipped movie industry, it's almost like an urban legend when someone tells you he's still drawing by hand. Enter animation master Hayao Miyazaki.

For Miyazaki, the 68-year-old "Walt Disney of Japan", hand-drawn animation is a common practise, at least in his own studio Ghibli, located at a quiet and green street in suburb Tokyo. For example, his new movie -- Ponyo On the Cliff by the Sea, which will be released on August 14 in the US -- features a record of 170,000 frames, all were drawn by hand. He told New York Daily News that he's afraid people would never use eyes to perceive, and feel things around them because "everything we see is coming through computers or machines and then is being input in our brain cells." To make his two-dimensional personality clearer, he said he doesn't even like emails. Ponyo's story sounds like a variation on " The Little Mermaid" -- a magical goldfish Ponyo wants to become a human girl after she got a friendly approach by a 5-year-old boy Sosuke. However her magical change brings back not only a tsunami, but also all kinds of extinct sea life. Miyazaki said the movie was inspired by his trip to Japan's Seto Inland Sea, where he saw how people have polluted the sea. Miyazaki's former works, including the 2002 Academy Award wining "Spirited Away" didn't make the grade in the US, though they'd earned millions of dollars in his home country Japan.