’ChaO’ review: Anarchic Japanese anime imagines a fantastical near-future Shanghai

Dir: Yasuhiro Aoki. Japan. 2025. 90mins

A lowly worker at a delivery firm in a fantasy near-future Shanghai finds himself married to a mermaid princess on this comedy of romantic missteps and cultural misunderstandings. It’s a premise that, within the flawed palms, might be moderately twee, however veteran animator Yasuhiro Aoki’s terrific feature-directing debut leans into the grotesque and absurd components of human-merperson relations. Visually spectacular and energetic in fashion, it is a bracingly anarchic piece of storytelling that asserts a particular new voice in Japanese anime.

Pronounces a particular new voice in Japanese anime

Aoki has beforehand directed a number of quick movies and served as key animator or animation director on productions together with Neon Genesis Evangelion, Digimon: The Film and, most not too long ago, The Lord Of The Rings: The Conflict Of The Rohirrim. This image, from Studio4°C, shares one thing of the manufacturing firm’s maverick strategy to options together with Tekkonkinkreet (2006), which is a equally twisted tackle a fairytale premise. ChaO, which premieres in the principle competitors at Annecy, will subsequently display at Fantasia and ought to be a title of appreciable curiosity for specialist animation distributors. Toei releases it in Japan on August 15, whereas GKids has picked up North American rights.

The movie opens in a richly realised fantasy Shanghai, the place people and merpeople have discovered to reside collectively in harmonious coexistence. It’s a unprecedented piece of world-building, rendered in a vivid, impressionistic, typically nearly summary mixture of animation strategies. People and merpeople have their very own journey infrastructures – the town’s human inhabitants take the prepare, the sea-dwellers zip round utilizing helpful water tubes.

Operating late for an task, human cub reporter Juno (voiced by Ota Shunsei) hops right into a water tube, hoping to save lots of time. He misses out on the story anyway, however stumbles onto a far greater one: on a ship on the harbour, he spots Stephan (Oji Suzuka), the person whose relationship with the mermaid princess ChaO (Anna Yamada) heralded this golden period of peace between the peoples of the land and the ocean. He stows away, intent on studying Stephan’s story from the person himself. It’s a neat framing gadget, which takes on a satisfying additional dimension by the shut of the image.

The principle physique of the story, as recounted to Juno, tells of Stephan’s initially reluctant romance with the mermaid who, for a lot of the early levels of their courtship and marriage, takes the type of an infinite orange fish. Stephan, demoted by his despotic boss President Sea (Ryota Yamasato) to mop the deck of the corporate’s flagship boat, is swept overboard. He regains consciousness in a hospital mattress, as a large fish gazes at him with love in her eyes and a proposal of marriage on the desk. Recognizing a enterprise alternative, President Sea fast-tracks the hapless Stephan into wedded bliss. There’s a goofy, slapstick humour to a lot of the image: in her fish kind, ChaO is a well-meaning klutz with a expertise for destruction (happily, she additionally has a sylph-like semi-humanoid kind, as a wonderful blue-haired siren).

Because of voracious media consideration, the pair develop into immediate celebrities and the topic of intense scrutiny each time they seem in public. They’re an attention-grabbing couple definitely, however the movie’s eclectic character design signifies that ChaO is in no way the weirdest creature wandering the streets of Shanghai. Some characters, Stephan included, have a standard human kind. Others, like President Sea, are enormous, egg-shaped entities. After which there are nonetheless others who, for no obvious motive, have monstrous, outsized heads. All of it contributes to the movie’s gloriously lawless strategy to storytelling and a gleefully untrammelled spirit. And whereas there are moments when ChaO’s enthusiastic embrace of chaos can come on the expense of readability, for probably the most half it’s an absolute blast.