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| FANTASIA |
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| ChaO at FANTASIA July 27 at 4:00 PM |
It’s rare to witness an animated film that feels both exuberantly fresh and steeped in cultural metaphor. ChaO, the dazzling debut feature from veteran animator Yasuhiro Aoki, is just such a film—a psychedelic fusion of romance, politics, and surrealism set in a cyberpunk Shanghai where humans and merfolk co-exist in uneasy harmony. Premiering in competition at Annecy and making a splash at Fantasia, this riotous, genre-scrambling fantasia announces Aoki as a formidable auteur and extends the legacy of Studio 4ºC’s boundary-pushing tradition.
The narrative structure is deceptively simple: in a future Shanghai pulsating with visual overload—where humans ride elevated trains and merfolk dart through slick underwater tubes—young journalist Juno (Ota Shunsei) chases a story that leads him to Stephen (Oji Suzuka), a former ship designer whose unlikely romance with the mermaid princess ChaO (Anna Yamada) catalyzed a fragile peace between land and sea. This framing device allows the film to travel back to our near-present, recounting the wild series of events that led Stephen, a low-level cog in a corporate machine, to become an unwitting diplomatic bridge—and husband to a fish.
Here, ChaO veers gleefully into absurdist territory. After a near-drowning incident, Stephen wakes up in a hospital bed to find himself being serenaded by an enormous, bright orange fish, who proposes marriage on behalf of her father, Neptunus, king of the merfolk. What might play as farce in other hands becomes, in Aoki’s, a rich tableau of emotional dissonance and slapstick satire. There is grotesquerie and grace in equal measure: ChaO, in her original piscine form, is as destructive as she is endearing, while her alternate guise as a blue-haired siren adds a layer of classical allure.
The film’s visual language is nothing short of hallucinogenic. Every frame teems with detail—Shanghai is rendered as a coral reef of steel and neon, its streets bursting with creatures whose forms defy anatomical logic. Human characters coexist with egg-shaped bosses, tentacled commuters, and sentient signage. Artistic director Hiroshi Takiguchi crafts a metropolis that feels alive in the way few animated cities do, while composer Takatsugu Muramatsu’s score oscillates between sweeping orchestral swells and glitchy electronica, mirroring the film’s tonal range.
Yet beneath its anarchic surface, ChaO is a surprisingly tender exploration of connection across species and the bureaucratic absurdity that can both enable and inhibit love. The relationship between Stephen and ChaO is never simple, and the film wisely avoids flattening their dynamic into cliché. Their intimacy is hard-won, awkward, and profoundly funny—a portrait of diplomacy as a deeply personal act.
There are moments when the chaos threatens to overwhelm, and the storytelling can buckle under the weight of its visual invention. But this, too, feels intentional. Aoki leans into the messiness of myth-making, offering a world not of clean allegories, but one where truth is murky and transformation—romantic, political, and personal—is always strange.
With ChaO, Yasuhiro Aoki doesn’t just retell The Little Mermaid; he detonates it, reassembling its pieces into something gloriously weird and undeniably alive. The result is one of the boldest anime debuts in recent memory—funny, fearless, and utterly unmissable.
ありがとう。またすぐに会いましょう" Arigatō. Mata sugu ni aimashō!"Twitter Facebook Instagram Pinterest Paradox
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