Chaos reigns in Yasuhiro Aoki’s anarchic, wildly imaginative feature directorial debut ChaO, a whirlwind exploration of the breadth of storytelling potential in animated film. Almost assaultively vibrant in its bright colors, fast pace, fantastical elements, and bold disregard for conventional narrative style and structure, it’s a somewhat disorienting experience to behold, and perhaps lacking some depth. But Aoki’s inventiveness extends to all aspects of his creation, and, while said invention may be of value in and of itself, its expert execution is where ChaO’s real value lies.
Even the movie’s ostensibly simple plot is rendered complex through the manner of its telling. ChaO opens with two fables, both told briefly, before revealing them to be the contents of a book, read by Juno (Shunsei Ôta), a journalist running late for a high-profile interview opportunity in a fantasy future where humans and merfolk live side by side. When he misses his gig, he happens upon a juicier scoop, spotting a ship worker he recognizes as Stephan (Ouji Suzuka), a man whose history was crucial to the societal integration of the people of both land and sea. Stowing away on his ship, he seizes the chance to speak to Stephan and get the inside track on his story.
From two introductory fables, ChaO passes through what we eventually understand to be the framing device of Juno’s tale, into Stephan’s tale. Now a humble man living an apparently modest life at sea, he was once an even humbler man working for Shanghai’s pre-eminent shipping company, when a freak accident saw him become inexplicably betrothed to ChaO (Anna Yamada), the princess of the sea. Despite his personal objections, political tensions force Stephan to endure this difficult romance and its complicated courtship — ChaO appears above sea level in fish form, comically unaccustomed to the landlubbers’ way of life, and her enthusiastic affection for the anxious, reluctant Stephan is scarcely returned. The particulars of this courtship occupy the majority of the movie’s action — in essence, a pretty ordinary rom-com premise, albeit one with quite an outlandish twist.
But ChaO isn’t a pretty ordinary movie. Aoki’s style is frantic, subversive, and resolutely chaotic. He lingers on quirky incidental details, sometimes crude, sometimes just outright bizarre, and minimizes tonal and narrative clarity and coherence. He cuts between stories and time periods with no warning, and the movie has a distinctly syncopated rhythm, accentuated by its dense visual style and its ambitious juxtapositions of different genre tropes and motifs. In individual shots, he combines tense stillness and furious action, heartfelt emotion and cheeky humor, pausing to hone in on one oddity or another. ChaO has a most singular timbre, and Aoki’s unique creative choices aren’t just entertainingly curious — some possess a peculiar sense of poetry, even if their intention isn’t always obvious, such as the pneumatic drilling that interrupts and completely drowns out a pivotal angry outburst from Stephan.
It’s thoughtful details like this that prevent ChaO from existing as merely an exhausting, if impressive, display of rabid imagination. Once it reaches its final act, and an element of mystery has finally contributed some tension, and thus purpose, to its otherwise meandering plot, its structure begins to make sense with an extended flashback — a journalist writing an article must operate like a detective, working backwards through their story/case to discover its truth, and ChaO’s reverse structural chronology functions similarly. Ultimately, the mystery isn’t quite as original as the stylistic verve with which Aoki has saturated his movie, though he uses it to imbue it with sentiment, and he’s moderately successful with this attempt. If it’s not exactly moving, it’s at least a little touching. But it’s rare to see a director, least of all one making their first feature, have so much success with so many new proposals, and rare to see them coalesce so seamlessly into a satisfying whole. This is a thrilling movie, burgeoning with vivid passion and uninhibited abandon, and a wondrous celebration of animation.
Published as part of IFFR 2026 — Dispatch 1.
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