Some movies teach you how to swim. Some throw you in the deep end. Yasuhiro Aoki’s “ChaO” is a great big splash of an anime romance, dunking the audience in a weird and luscious world where humans and mermen live side-by-side, and you can either take a bus to work or — if you can breathe water, or hold your breath long enough — a high speed floating current. It’s a magical place, manic and sensitive and hopeful and corrupt, just like the real world. Except everyone has bigger or thinner heads than usual. And some people are also fish.
“ChaO” tells a tale of how this world came into being, and although legend says it happened long ago, the major developments were in the last couple decades. Humans and mermen have an uneasy co-existence, inflamed by the dangers of shipping, where innocent aquatic animals are inadvertently sucked into boat propellers on a daily basis. (We also do a lot of, you know, fishing. You’d think the mermen would be angrier about that, but they eat fish too so I guess we get a pass on that one.)
Our hapless hero — they’re always hapless, aren’t they — has invented a new propulsion system that wouldn’t hurt the mermen. But it’s also slower and more expensive, so his boss demotes him from the research and development department to his deckhand. It’s a rough day for poor Stefan (Ōji Suzuka), and that’s before the King Neptunus (Kenta Miyake) hits his boss’s boat with a giant destructive wave, and the king’s daughter ChaO (Anna Yamada) drags him under the waves.
Now, all of a sudden everyone’s Stefan’s best friend, because at some point while he was unconscious he got engaged to ChaO. He doesn’t know her, he doesn’t love her, and he isn’t attracted to fish people, but the marriage will finally forge a union between the surface-dwellers and the fish folk, so he’s forced to along with it.
ChaO usually presents as a great big fish, adorable and childlike, but when merpeople trust a human, they let that human see them as they really are. So as Stefan gets to know her, and gradually falls in love with her, he sees the gorgeous, blue-haired, slightly more anatomically compatible mermaiden for who she really is. It’s a visual metaphor that’s always fraught — and summons unpleasant memories of “Shallow Hal” — but “ChaO’s” insistence that Stefan only sees the half-human version of his wife when she trusts him, and not when he’s being superficial, takes the edge off what could have been a painful, hacky trope.
The love story between Stefan and ChaO is amusingly contrived, like an early Ernst Lubitsch rom-com about marrying royalty and figuring out the emotional connection later. Ironically, since Stefan’s the one way outside of his comfort zone, it’s ChaO who has to move into his humble human abode, innocently preparing him live electric eels for breakfast and accidentally setting fireworks off in their house. Yes, she really is a fish out of water. I’d pause for laughter but it barely qualifies as a joke. It’s just what’s actually happening.
Yasuhiro Aoki’s film could have stayed grounded (sigh) but “ChaO” is set in such an outlandish world that it’s easy to stay dazzled. Stefan doesn’t have much family but he does live with a robotics expert who makes alarm clocks that slap you in the face until you wake up, and also afterwards. Eventually a mermaid will rock a giant mech suit, and no matter how odd the rest of the movie was beforehand, it’s still a wild image.
There’s so much visual ingenuity on display that “ChaO” quickly overwhelms its own, relatively simple story. It doesn’t help that Hanasaki Kino’s screenplay does all the heavy lifting with Stefan and ChaO’s relationship in the final act, so for a long time Stefan mostly flounders, making a total (b)ass of himself. It’s hard for “ChaO” to win us back over, to the point that we actually want them to stay together at the end, but the filmmakers make it work. If nothing else, there’s so much manic energy in the climax that we don’t have time to put up our defenses.
Whether the love story completely works or not, “ChaO” is such a visual wonder that it hardly matters. It’s a lush and emotional and, despite the sugar-addled intensity Yasuhiro Aoki crams into every scene, oddly inviting. It’s a pretty wonderful world. And granted, the seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake, but it’s easy to dream about wandering around there. That’s not a big mistake. Just look at the world around now, on land and the ocean floor. Such wonderful things abound in “ChaO.”
What more are you looking for?
“ChaO” is now playing in select theaters.
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