On DVD: "Ponyo"

How cute is Ponyo, Hayao Miyazaki's freehand interpretation of "The Little Mermaid"? Almost immeasurably so. You could take the cuteness of Disney's The Little Mermaid and of Miyazaki's My Neighbour Totoro, and multiply them together - but then you'd also have to factor in the artistry that leaves the Mouse House's recent hand-drawn hopeful The Princess and the Frog looking doubly old-hat. Miyazaki has here reconnected his source text to the elements, turning his eye to the way storms blow in and waves break on the shore. An animation like Finding Nemo can dazzle us with sheer fluid motion, but Ponyo looks like an essay written in a gorgeous penhand about the poetics of water.

Ponyo is a little red goldfish with the face of TV's Pob (and a surprising number of Ponyo siblings swimming around her) who washes up in the pail of Sosuke, a rather lonely boy who lives with his mother on a cliff overlooking the sea. Before boy and fish can be properly introduced, Ponyo is reined in by her misanthropic father - but only after she's tasted human blood, which allows her to grow hands and webbed feet (and, presumably, lungs) and return to dry land in the form of an inquisitive little girl. "Sometimes we need to make a leap," Sosuke's no-nonsense mum insists; our plucky aquatic heroine certainly does that.

Once again, Miyazaki puts his green-leaning messages - take care of the oceans, look after your elders - across without hitting you over the head with them; he even makes using plug-in rechargeable lightbulbs and putting honey (rather than sugar) in your children's tea seem, well, natural. The sensitivity apparent in the filmmaking is all-encompassing: I saw the dubbed version - overseen by John Lasseter, with an English translation by E.T.'s Melissa Mathison - and didn't for one moment feel that the tale's essential innocence had been compromised by an eclectic voice cast that includes Tina Fey (as Sosuke's mom), Liam Neeson (as Ponyo's dad) and, most surprisingly, junior members of the Cyrus and Jonas clans (whose title song is, dare I say it, eminently downloadable) in prominent positions.

This is an animation that even remains eloquent in its silences - the sound design often seeks to reproduce the quietness to be found at the bottom of a swimming pool, or under the sea - and, from first to last, displays its creator's love of all creatures great and small, from Ponyo's mother (a Gaia figure rendered not so much as a cruel mistress as a beautiful fairytale princess) to the protozoic jellyfish emerging into the light in the film's prologue. It's on the head of one of these creatures that Ponyo rises to the surface in an early set-piece, racing against a trawler dragging a net over the sea bottom, its propeller at full pelt. Our eyes are drawn to Ponyo's progress, but perhaps only Miyazaki would take such care to ensure her jellyfish messenger avoids a nasty fate itself. How cute is Ponyo? Just about adorable, I'd say.

Ponyo is available on DVD from tomorrow.