CHAO
2026
Directed by Yasuhiro Aoki
—Yasuhiro Aoki
That's a real quote from the director of ChaO (that rendition of its title isn't a typo, though I don't really get it). The quote regards the animation director (and character designer) of ChaO, and in context it's mostly complimentary, as he goes on to clarify that this is an example of Kojima "liking cute things"—though the "living alone" part seemed like an unnecessary clarification—but for whatever reason I felt like I needed to report it, as it feels like it might give some kind of insight, out-of-focus as it might be, into this playful doodle of a film that probably belongs to Kojima more than its other two principals, which is devoted to showcasing, and how, the most idiosyncratic brand of "cute" you ever did see. Short version, it's about a guy deciding whether he wants to fuck an ambulatory fish who, to my mind, actually looks more like a shrimp, and who sometimes looks like a babe, if you accept that, within this stylization, "babe" is what you're looking at, even then. The longer version would include the giant egg man the main guy works for, who's basically a giant spherical head a couple yards wide, probably with feet at the bottom, though in honesty I never actually looked to be sure.
Kojima comes off like he might've been the auteur here, then, but there appears to be no real telling who was the principal driver of this fever dream though, being a fever dream, it seems like it ought to have been somebody; what I've kind-of sort-of pieced together is that the project did originate with its screenwriter (this being even less a given with animation than usual), Saku Konohana, and maybe it was that guy, given that at least with Konohana now we can start finding affinities and patterns across a filmography, Konohana turning out to be familiar to us by way of his previous writing credit, also for Studio 4°C, a certain Children of the Sea, which is likewise about merpeople of some description and about "how the lifeforms from the land and the sea are different, no, actually they're the same" but, on the other hand, is "about" these things in the most wholly opposite way they could possibly be while still being about them at all, as a matter of genre and tone, so I just don't know if Konohana wrote another preposterously po-faced and obtuse epic about undersea mysticism and Aoki and Kojima took it away and roundtabled it with the latter's cats until they'd warped it into something completely different, or if Konohana always conceived of it as a palate-cleansing exercise on the fun side of utter goofballery after a film that was just as goofy about its subject matter but brimmed with bullshit pomposity it instead. But given that both films are largely incoherent as stories, it seems like the safest bet is attributing at least a small measure of authorship to our screenwriter.
Whatever the case, we have ChaO, and we begin sometime in the further reaches of the 21st century in, curiously enough for an anime, Shanghai—Aoki fixing upon the setting as a place where magic can happen (Shangai? in the People's Republic of China? that Shanghai?), so it turns out orientals can be totally orientalist to each other—which has undergone some changes in the last few years or decades since humanity and the society of merpeople reached their epochal understanding and their modes of living began to interpenetrate one another, perhaps most notably in the Futuramaesque tubes of magic water that run through the city as a form of rapid transit best left to those selfsame merpeople, although down-on-his-luck reporter Juno (Shunsei Ota), late for a celebrity interview, isn't dead when he comes out the other side, so it sort of works for humans. He's too late anyway, and it is therefore by chance that he runs across one Stephan (Ouji Suzuka), "the famous Stephan," who helped bring humans and merfolk together. In fact, the first thing we ever saw was a children's picture book that expressly situates this as fable—if it didn't with its content, then with its picture book style—first relating an odd mash-up of "Snow White" and "Sleeping Beauty," before moving on to the lesser-known story of the man who fought a sea mosnter, but was saved by a beautiful mermaid which trails off before it can actually finish; and I take this more as an injunction telling us how to understand this movie, rather than as a key to it. Well, despite Juno's new target's keen disinterest in speaking to any reporter, he stows away on his boat, and Stephan, having mercy on the determined journalist, gives him his tale. This flings us back to a nearer future—20XX—and seems like it ought to relieve us, by shifting to another protagonist, of some of the most incredibly off-putting stylized character design you'll ever seen in an anime (the rummy nose on Juno is something), but it turns out that back then that Stephan, though now a rugged mariner, was a much more twerpish-looking and pallid figure with a worse haircut and a highly-similar blotch in the middle of his face, and it'll turn out he is the normal. I'll also just throw it out there: "our hero is a Chinese guy named 'Stephan,' in this Japanese-language film."
So back in the day we find Stephan, still an engineer for Shanghainese shipbuilding magnate Shi (Ryota Yamasoto), and desperately trying to get his boss to approve the expenditures for a new kind of ship engine, effectively the caterpillar drive from The Hunt For Red October in its operation except perhaps even more magical, as he intends the invention to replace the screw propellers that are causing so many injuries to marine life, including the merpeople (even in 20XX, we're already well aware of their existence and relations have been established), but while I can see why it might be, hypothetically, safer, later events will indicate that you can be sucked into the damn thing and come out okay, despite my prior assumption that taking a trip through the Krasny Oktyabr's drive unit would still have been, you know, the very last thing you did. Perhaps less trivially to observe, that's the conflict between land and sea here, which feels curiously chosen—propellers are sometimes deadly, and probably their more thoroughgoing problem for the marine life we care about is their incessant noise, and considering the merpeople's abilities, it seems like "getting the fuck out of the way" would be an entirely reasonable solution to propeller hazard—and it feels very curiously chosen when they don't mention, oh, climate change, or microplastics, or fertilizer runoff, or whathaveyou. (By happenstance, almost simultaneously with this I watched that Simpsons' "Treehouse of Horror" where Lisa offhandedly mentions to the invading king of the dolphins, who has a different grudge, all the garbage that humans have been dumping into the oceans, and one gets the vague impression that the king of these merpeople, Neptunus (Kenta Miyake), would likewise shout, "That was you?" if you told him.)
If I am indicating something of a tottery story, yes it is, and I haven't really gotten to the tottery part yet. Anyway: Shi, petty plutocrat, puts his whiney engineer to work scrubbing the decks of his damn yacht, and he almost drowns in an accident, but he's fished out of his watery grave by a giant orangey-pink fishwoman, Ao Soni Chao Neptunus (Anna Yamada)—Chao for short, though as her surname suggests, the princess of the merpeople, but also a merwoman deeply, madly in love with Stephan, who is essentially shanghaied (hey!) into a betrothal to this grotesque fish-shrimp-thing when the media circus around his rescue turns to her feelings, she cheerily says she'd be delighted to marry Stephan, and the possibility of an alliance between Shi's company and Neptunus's realm causes things to get out of hand so fast not only does Stephan's head spin, so will yours, while mine kind of just twisted right off. Stephan privately complains to his roommate, roboticist Robert (Yuichiro Umehara), and Robert's pining quasi-girlfriend Maibei (Kavka Shishido), but sort of tries making a go of his whirlwind romance with the swooning fish, and from time to time notices that she looks (sort of) like a lady instead, her natural state under the water—for in what I'd call a fairly unintuitive take on "merpeople lore," they're shapeshifters, and underwater they look like humans, and above the sea and especially on land they turn completely into fish, what a world this is—but it is a state she could occupy forever, if she feels safe, and comfortable, and loved in return.
This is altogether dysfunctional, and despite all those constant asides, I've probably still made it sound more functional than it actually is, because it almost feels dysfunctional on purpose (to repeat: ABOVE THE WATER, THEY LOOK LIKE FISH), and it doesn't seem like making something functional out of what I think we can call some pretty tried and true material ought to have been too terribly hard. The most dysfunctional thing is the extraordinarily broken macrostructure that's intensified by the editing choices around Stephan's rescue: the movie feels like it's going out of its way to suggest that whenever Chao fell in love with him, it was during what comes off like great big lacuna in the story during his spell of unconsciosness, and that he has simply forgotten why this is the case and, presumably, that he fell in love with her too, and gosh, did I ever read that wrong—there is a reason she fell in love with him, but it's something else entirely—though however the reveal was to shake out, there's never a reason for it to be any reveal, something the movie basically admits in a lampshading joke in the third act. This basically means there's a pointless question mark hanging over its entire runtime and that it's not going to work for more than isolated moments as a romance, despite, I'd forward, a good heart and some good ideas, especially a visual conceit that, with a blind optimism about the power of love, keeps doggedly pursuing the idea that, in the warm light of affection and familiarity, that which doesn't initially seem very lovely at all can become beautiful anyway. (To add to the dysfunctionality, however, it is still, at bottom, a movie about deciding whether or not this guy wants to fuck this fish, and staying pretty far away from the details of how physical desire and physical intimacy are intended to work between them—I mean, Shape of Water might've just looked at you like you were the asshole when you asked, "wait, this human wants to fuck this fish?", but at least it did more-or-less describe how she did, whereas I have no basis to imagine that Chao even does internal fertilization—kind of makes its romance less complete than it otherwise could be. That "perversity" isn't even one the film's angles almost makes it feel weirder, given the set-up.)
But it does have those isolated moments of sweetness and connection, and while I'm not about to declare "not having much of an effective overarching plan" to put them in doesn't matter, it matters less than it should, and it gets to where it needs to go. Moreover, what it's mainly doing, anyhow, is tilting heavily towards the "com" side of "romcom," just an astonishingly loose collection of stuff that its makers thought would be funny, tied together as much by the rubbernecking fascination of watching such a bizarre premise as "and then he was forcibly wed to a sea monster, who attempts with much gumption, but no relevant experience, to be the perfect tradwife" play out, and I can't lie, it's sort of magnetic in just watching it fling ideas about how Chao doesn't get human society and is bad at intuiting things about it and slow at learning even when she's shown, whilst Stephan zanily navigates an externalized Kafkaesque nightmare. I don't know if it doesn't eventually run out of these ideas—the inciting incident for their breakup (of course they breakup, it's a romcom) is precipitated by, like, a crazy robot rampage—but this scenario winds up occupying a long middle, rather longer than I'm sure you'd have guessed from that summarization earlier, because despite expending so many words on it I only even brought us up to this long middle. One of the strategies this nonsensical movie's employing to put its nonsense over (which of course is also its grave flaw) is going insanely fast; the premise has already kicked in hard by maybe no later than fifteen minutes out of a ninety minute total, and while it's only sometimes laugh-out-loud funny (the single best joke involves the differing species forms the merpeople take on, one of which is "a sea turtle"), it's throwing out jokes and physical humor (people get hit in the head in this movie a shocking amount of times) and simple eyebrow-raising strangenesses at a constant clip, and at no point did I ever get close to bored with it.
That might've been impossible anyway: this thing looks wild. It's a Studio 4°C movie, a statement that has largely come to mean "it looks like no other movie, even other Studio 4°C movies,*" which is true although some broad commonalities can be observed, like "this is sort of horrid, though, isn't it?" The caveat has always been it's always a pretty cool kind of horrid, but ChaO could be the first project in a while where they've arrived at a broken, fucked-up story that can actually be mutually supportive with the studio's broken, fucked-up visual personality—I suppose this is something like the core theme of the movie, after a fashion—and maybe it's just down to it being so avowedly frivolous, with Children of the Sea in 2019 and All You Need Is Kill earlier this year taking on aggressively abnormal character design but being extremely self-serious about it (Kill not benefiting from it at all, being an already-famous story that's frankly too typical for its level of atypical stylization to have been useful). ChaO, anyway, feels like a playground, an anarchic romp through just whatever the hell they felt like drawing: "a freakish fish chick? Oh sure, we'll have all manner of fun with that, but in exchange you're going to let us draw the most inexplicably weird humans in, perhaps, the history of cartoons."
That's a huge claim but I'm drawing a blank trying to think of a cartoon where they're this weird and this inexplicable; I've mentioned our ovoid boss shipwright, and there's an "editorial cartoon" logic to that design, except there are other characters with giant heads for no apparent reason (there's one minor character whose head is microscopically small so he uses a magnifying screen; Robert seems to be an experiment in reaching the fundamental limits of how thin an anime character—an anime character—can get, and often looks like a living lens distortion), and even my stopgap explanation, "the more annoying characters have unusual heads," sort of disintegrated, considering there's a nonverbal baby walking around who's practically bigger than Stephan, and I just had to accept that it was chaos and play and cats napping on musclecars driving 90mph and it's very exciting to watch even if it's frequently repulsive—as noted, even the most normal human dudes are pretty ugly—so that in some respects, the most appeal, in the "animation principles" sense or even in just the colloquial sense, demonstrated by any character does come from Chao, after all, even in her fishy form. In her humanoid guise, it's almost relieving—aesthetically-speaking, like taking a breath of air before plunging back in, to see a character you can at least comprehend why somebody might've wanted to draw, and the transformations, mostly done with discontinuity (sometimes in-frame discontinuity, there's a stunner of a shot using the effects animation of a water feature), are one of the more reliable drivers of a humor as Stephan attempts to come to grips with his quandary. And hand it to Kojima: the "ichthys," Jesus-fishy eye construction on humanoid-Chao and Stephan alike to link them is cute.
This is on top of backgrounds that probably do have more precedent but scarcely comes off less unusual, and are sort of hard to efficiently describe, though what occurred to me was "what if 101 Dalmatians was Blade Runner but also if Blade Runner was a sunny, optimistic fantasy," spaces that are fairly well-detailed but those details are communicated with the most incredible sketchiness, more "chalk-drawing" than "pencil-drawing," even, so it's got that one up on Dalmatians, but including "lighting effects" mediated by scraggly lines drawn directly onto the backdrops. It's all significantly less indebted to 3-D backdrop design and camera layout than has become the standard in feature anime over the past decade, though it's not devoid of showpieces (and even, more quietly, individual shots) that manage to do that seamlessly within this aesthetic; more importantly, it presents a world that these mutants can almost naturally exist in, and it's a riot of color front to back. It's not even a movie I would necessarily recommend, and in fact I probably wouldn't to anybody who didn't have an interest in animation as an evolving artform. Yet the joy that obviously went into it is communicated more immediately than any cartoon I've seen in a while, and that counts for a lot even if the priorities of the people who made it are this alienating-—but then, that's kind of its own selling point, too.
Score: 7/10
*In disclosure, there's a few I haven't seen. Maybe they're totally normal.
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