Gake no Ue no Ponyo is a children's love story, driven with monomaniacal ferocity by Ponyo and Sousuke's pure mutual affection. But when waves begin to lap at the doorstep to Sousuke's hilltop home and the townsfolk jovially pile into rowboats to scud over a swollen sea of prehistoric fish, we begin to wonder whether this is the real world or some beatific daydream. Wide-eyed wizard Fujimoto, voiced with narcoleptic mania by comedian Tokoro Joji, is by far the most rational of the film's fantastical creations. He grounds us in a world that wavers between the real and the surreal.

He is intelligent yet careless, deeply conscientious but distracted by impulse. Sousuke, a five-year-old who retrieves the eponymous Ponyo from the ocean, is not another Pinocchio-like screen caricature. Perhaps this is why the film has appealed more to adults than to children in Japan: children still live in this world. Remarkably, Miyazaki has yet again achieved what he created in Totoro: a film that draws the viewer indelibly into the world of children, reminding us of the time when every discovery was unique, every possession precious, and the agony of loss crouched behind every well-meaning mistake.

In style and content, this is clearly a children's fantasy, and yet it isn't. And yet the film's omnipresent water is defined by hard lines that seem to have been drawn in with crayons and coloured by pastels.

In the opening sequences, literally thousands of individually animated fish swirl across the screena task Western animators wouldn't touch without a room full of computers. The film is simultaneously stunning in its beauty and endearing in its simplicity, unrestrained enthusiasm walking the edge between inspired brilliance and mind-addling delirium. Gake no Ue no Ponyo is like something you might get if you mashed My Neighbour Totoro into The Little Mermaid, then put the entire project in the hands of a five-year-old animation prodigy.

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