Veteran studio animator Aoki Yasuhiro’s deliriously surreal debut feature, ChaO, imagines a world where humans and sentient merpeople coexist peacefully. Combining European and Japanese mermaid lore, the story employs a unique, if clumsy, framing device that establishes a clash of tradition and modernity, as well as the filmmakers’ gung-ho readiness to bewilder their audience. At the very least, animation enthusiasts and those with strong mind-altering substances at the ready will be suitably rewarded by the time the credits roll.
In near-future Shanghai, pipes and waterslides for merfolk transit weave harmoniously among gleaming skyscrapers, escalators, and overpasses. Conflict simmers, though, regarding mankind’s destructive treatment of the seas. Stephan (Suzuka Ōji) is an engineer for a boating company, struggling to sell his greedy Daruma doll-shaped boss (Yamasato Ryōta) on an environmentally friendly skiff propeller, when, one day, a bulbous mermaid princess, ChaO (Yamada Anna), emerges from the seas declaring her eternal love for him. Stephan quickly finds himself at the center of a media frenzy, thrust into a highly public engagement with the potential to advance cultural understanding and ease land-sea political relations.
In its most emotionally effective passages, ChaO takes on the cadence of a charming, if retrograde, rom-com, in which the initially grousing Stephan, pressured into what’s essentially an arranged marriage, learns through wacky trials and tribulations how to love his awkward yet unconditionally adoring stay-at-home fish-wife. When submerged in water or made to feel sufficiently safe with her partner, ChaO transforms from her standard fishy form to the more humanoid visage of a svelte, graceful turquoise-haired beauty. (How does she walk and breathe on land in her fish form? Well, she wears giant sneakers on her tail fins. Don’t question it.)
Stephan, with help from his quirky scientist friends, thus evolves from trying to pounce on his wife in the bathroom or, sigh, while she’s asleep to a fuller understanding of her insecurities and a genuine desire to protect and provide for her, all while dodging the imperious intrusions of his father-in-law, King Neptunus (Miyake Kenta). But ChaO, as written by Kino Hanasaki, makes very little room for earnest character work, as it’s too busy laying on a maximalist stream of images, gags, and cartoony action set pieces that seem to encapsulate anything the animators at Studio 4C fancied on a particular day during the film’s seven-year production.
ChaO’s fantasy world comes to vibrant life through impressionistic backgrounds and lived-in details, from the nerdy accoutrements of Stephan’s bachelor pad to Shanghai’s angular neon-glowing futuristic art installations. Character designs are charmingly grotesque, some drawn with human proportions and others with the shape of bobbleheads, suggesting the pop art of Murakami Takashi, as well as prior Studio 4C films like Genius Party and Tekkonkinkreet, as the distorted figures squeeze, stretch, and bounce exuberantly through densely packed frames.
Chao is a boisterous celebration of the flatness and fluidity of traditional hand-drawn animation (Aoki especially loves the motif of brilliant summer sunlight on moist surfaces), relegating its small amount of CG modeling largely to unobtrusive background elements, while embracing the expressive potential of storybook backgrounds and off-model character art. The narrative is nonsense, but it’s at least an arch and sweet kind of nonsense as it jumps through its fairy-tale hoops on the way to the next splash of artful color and manically doodled creativity.
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