Excellent show combining fun cartoon, rich characters and sea facts. My son has given up all shows for Octonauts and now calls himself Peso! He assigns everyone a character as he sees people.The best part is when he wants to have a conversation about the show. The other day he came to me and said, "Mom, let's discuss krill." My son is 3, so it is exciting to hear how it has expanded his vocabulary to algae and krill. Sea animals are no longer sharks and whales, but hammerhead sharks and orca whales.

Saying something interesting about children's programming requires a critical shift, acknowledging that we are not the primary consumer. Actually, for much of this media, I think parents are that target audience. Sesame Street cannot possibly be as educational as advertised, but great effort is obviously spent convincing parents that it is.Well, here we have something that is educational in a narrow sense, but very well engineered for kids. Let's set aside the specification of the character set, the determination of the animation style, the jokes, the pace…What impressed me is how the synthetic world is placed. Suppose that a goal of the project is to introduce kids to the marvels of living creatures and systems of living creatures. Choosing the oceans is almost a no-brainer because of the diversity and strangeness of the creatures, plus the fact that kids normally don't encounter sea creatures.Much harder is deciding how to span our world with theirs. Look at what has been done here. The representative of our world is a band of anthropomorhized animals. We explore with them and also get educated by them, but the emphasis is on exploration and care of the explored. The octonauts are headed by a sea creature, an octopus that oddly breathes air not water and seems the most human of the band. The group also — and essentially, I believe — includes 'vegimals' a further hybrid that blends animals and plants. We (the humans in the audience) are blended, folded into our representatives, and they are folded into what they observe.Now look at the other side of the divide: the sea creatures are themselves anthropomorphized, but to a subtle lesser extent. They speak English to the octonauts; they have the same emotional vocabulary as well. But they are apart, of nature.I cannot think of a more creative approach to the cinematic problem of bringing the world of the child to the world of the sea, in a way that carries observation and message.

A wonderful programme that appeals to children of all ages - hell, even I enjoy watching it and that's saying something considering most children's programmes drive me insane. The episodes are informative without being boring, exciting without being frightening, and witty without being crude. The writing is intelligent, and doesn't resort to the easy and dull 'goodies vs baddies' scenario adopted by so many other cartoons. I even love the choice of voices (Scouse for the Walrus) & music (sitar for a very relaxed shark). To top it all, my 3 year old now has an encyclopedic knowledge of sea creatures that probably surpasses most adults' ...Afterall, did you know that Cookie Cutter Sharks eat their own teeth? No? Neither did I.

It's quite hard to see a good children's television series on this days, and most of them are annoying, dumb and patronizing. Fortunately, this is not the case of "The Octonauts" a cute and enjoyable show, that not only has a cast of adorable (but non-annoying, or stupid) characters, but also a good stories: At first it seems like all the episodes follow the same pattern (The Octonauts meet some marine animal with a problem, the Octonauts bring their help, the problem is solved, and then they sing " creature report", a song that recaps the events of the episode) just like "Phineas and Ferb", this show manages to keep fresh and interesting, avoiding most of the annoying clichés from modern kid's shows (Such as toilet humor, cheap cultural references, lame puns and stupid characters who keep saying stupid things)The animation is simple, but good: The designs are appealing, the use of colors is good, fitting very well to the light-hearted and gentle atmosphere of the series.Even if "The Octonauts" isn't the best cartoon from the recent years, it is still a pretty good one, a shining gem among the usual boring stuff from CBeebies. And of course, it is much better than most of the (animated or live action) show of Discovery Kids.