Juno, a young journalist, fails to make the connection to an important assignment handed down to him by his editor. However, he may have stumbled upon a bigger scoop. Docked at the same harbor is a boat belonging to Stephen, the man who played an integral role in the harmony between humans and merfolk today. Juno convinces Stephen to let him interview them about how that happened. Thus, the story of Stephen and his engagement to a giant fish named ChaO begins.
Director Yasuhiro Aoki, a journeyman for the famed Japanese animation studio, Studio 4ºC, makes their directorial debut with, ChaO, a joyous and hilarious retelling of The Little Mermaid, set in a future Shanghai. A gargantuan task, it only took seven years and over 100,000 drawings to complete but the end result is pure magic and comedy cold.
As visually dense as can be, backgrounds pop off the screen in an effort to compete visually with the full-energy character animation. Humans, featuring a character design with noses and eyes that look very close to fish, disobey the rules of skeletal structure as good animation should. Bosses, like Stephen’s boss at the shipbuilding company they are employed at, or Neptune, ChaO’s father who switches between their mer-form and a whale, are giants when compared to their dependents. The freedom of animation is that anything is possible and does not have to be explained.
ChaO herself looks like a giant orange carp when she is on land, which is so startling to Stephen. How did he become betrothed to this giant, orange fish? But when she is in water something changes and it is enough to pique Stephen’s curiosity. What he doesn’t know is why him. He thinks it is because he has been working on a new propulsion system for boats that will be safe for mer-people. But there is more, and for that he will have to go far back into his story and see the events that motivate him in the present day and his work at the shipping company. That’s just good story telling.
The story is often hilarious with laugh out loud moments one after the other. Visual gags are in your face and hiding in the corners. What’s not funny now is very funny later on in the story when jokes that are set up in the first act meet their punchline in the final one. The story’s writer, Saku Konohana, knows how to play the short and the long game.
A joyous story of love, loss and comedic adventure ChaO explodes on the screen with controlled chaos. It is a stellar debut from Yasuhiro Aoki who must have been aching for the world to know this story, watching it come together over the course of seven years. We do not want to wait another seven for their next feature film.