ChaO

ChaO is an ambitious and colourful movie utilising an obscenely huge amount of hand-drawn frames to tell a commonplace story of a guy being sought after by his non-human love interest, in this case a ‘mermaid’, that decides she’s going to be his bride and comes to live with him. The story plays out in a typical way: The FMC comes to live with the MC and wants to marry him, and the MC wants nothing to do with her since she’s pretty much a literal giant fish he’s under social pressure to marry (with some hints of her human form, which is later achieved, ... but nothing more). Quirky mishaps ensue as the FMC tries to fit into human society, the MC blows his fuse and lashes out, the FMC is heartbroken and leaves, and the MC has a moment of introspection and sets out to bring her back. The script is cliche, but being the ambitious movie that it is, there are some things worth seeing here.

To start with, everything is quite lively and the world is brimming with life from the characters with their energetic and detailed motion to the events transpiring in their backgrounds which too have been animated, there's lots of activity to every scene. The FMC despite being a mermaid is shown as a giant non-human puffy fish for most of the time she is on screen and this aspect combined with the ambitious production makes her pretty expressive and funny. Think of it as an emotionally expressive moeblob turned into a huge-headed puffy fishblob through some curse, made funnier and even more expressive by the ambitious production values.

For the first 44 minutes of its run out of a total of 1 hour 24 minutes, things are an absolute riot around our MC with lots of lively quirky situational physical comedy that ensues. An example: the MC awkwardly tries to fasten a necklace onto his giant fish-bride, who has no neck, while reluctant, socially pressured, and watched by people eager for the match to succeed, and faced with her blushing fish-cheeks. Again, made much funnier by the colourful, lively, and energetic production to everything in the scene overall. It is also more cartoonish than other titles with a similar formula, consider it closer to a Maasaki Yuasa sort of quirky cartoonish comedy title coupled with lots of caricatures and huge heads rather than the seasonal romcom or harem; however, this is where the show starts losing the plot.

The second half is the drama section of the show, which doesn’t have enough light-hearted novelty to keep things afloat. The romance suffers due to a lack of serious development between the MC and the FMC in her human form, which is her state from this point onwards for some time before going off screen again. Unlike in the trailer, the human form of the FMC is only seen for brief periods in a ‘reflecting the inner self’ sort of fashion through screens of water or while she is wet, like seeing her briefly behind a fountain, kind of like vampires and mirrors.

The backstory and the revelation for why the FMC loves the MC is poorly executed and with uninspired foreshadowing. There's a complete lack of the heroine’s personality being fleshed out in this waifubait-adjacent title, and the backstory fails to create an organic connection between the FMC and MC. More on it ahead. The borderline non-characters of ChaO do not mesh with the superficially warm (uneven lines) but unorthodox tracing of the Shanghai-based backgrounds for the backgrounds to enhance the emotional quality of their story. I find so much of the cityscape disagreeable to look at, like a nasty concrete jungle with a scaffolding-ish feel to it.

The rushed ending sequence begins when the MC arrives at his old hometown, influenced by his friend's earlier advice to appreciate the fish blob as family. Upon seeing a scribbled family picture on his old boat, a flood of memories returns. He recalls finding ChaO, silhouetted as a fish inside a translucent orb, which he had named "Raijin Unit 3" after his beloved action figure. He then realizes that the FMC’s later references to the toy were direct allusions to this childhood event, confirming she was present during that time. The MC remembers the trauma of his parents dying in a freak accident, leaving him and "Unit 3" as his only family. This vulnerable moment is shattered when local bullies confiscate the orb and accidentally drop it into the ocean while playing keep-away. This rush of context-setting flashbacks culminates in the final sequence where the MC pursues the FMC and engages in a confrontation with her mermaid father to take her back.

All of this happens in like 20 or so minutes without any real emotional resonance from either this or the foreshadowing of these elements in the prior minutes of the movie considering there is legitimately very poor connection, familial or otherwise, between a human child and a a fish silhouette in an egg and there’s no romance between a giant fish only used for comedy and a grown human male. The romance was bound to flop, but it NEVER really did end up saying anything about family EITHER, at least in a respectable thematic manner as all the MC did is bring fishblob back and have two kids with her.

Yashuhiro’s characters, through this whole ordeal, do not have the energy and quirky novelty of a Yuaasa or Saru show to make the later events harmonise with the first 44 minutes’ tone, and this is everything you need in scripts like these. It ‘gets to the point’, is plot driven, and is heavy in a melodramatic fashion. The fight at the end didn’t have the energy and emotions of say the characters escaping the whale in mind game or the merfolk pushing the water away from the city to the sound of hoarse passionate singing like in Yoake Tsugeru Lu no Uta with further emotional beats from the grandfather with the umbrella and the story of his mom. ChaO also doesn’t have anything like devolutions into emotional scribbles or genuinely emotional off-model expressions relative to a Yuaasa, but what it had was a heavy serious feel to it with some cartoonish elements like the MC’s face getting flattened by water splashed at him which made for a jarringly serious but quirky tone to the scene when accompanied by its “we are in peril” music. The MC is raised into the air through the father mermaid attacking him with jet streams and you’d think you’d see some energy with the MC stretching and moving forward over it/against it, like when the characters were resisting the current created by the whale opening its mouth in mind game.

The screenplay throughout the later part contributes to this poor pacing, here’s a more detailed contrasting example: A late “race to reach someone” built from four shared parts (a sudden revelation, hitching a ride, a helpful encounter with an old bully, and a small physical prop). In Yu Irie’s Hibi Rock, the MC learns his benefactor is dying and bolts from a remote fish factory, hitching a ride to the hospital; he’s screeching and shaking like a maniac while clutching a salted fish, which he brandishes along with his overpoweringly loud drowning screeching at the passenger seat besides the driver from where the driver is being yelled at for misusing the company car, and the driver, by chance the MC’s old school bully, is now speeding to help him as the whole car spirals into frantic, escalating chaos; whereas in ChaO, after speaking with his old bully, our MC rushes out only to be stopped over an unfinished coffee mug, gets almost left behind by a premature acceleration while half-boarding a hitched car, then the film lingers on a spill of that same coffee across the windshield while deboarding, and the pursuit stretches further into a slow, drawn-out boat ride interjected by a cut to another person to whom the story is being recounted. Each of these bleeds momentum from the scene instead of tightening it.

Aside from all this, ChaO is wrapped in lots of uninspired and boilerplate and dated ideas, developments, and scene elements. Basically, with a script like this, at some point you have to wonder if spending 9 years and upwards of 100,000 individual frames feels a bit wasteful. Something like this done to a quality script has an additive effect, here the script renders the production effort partially or somewhat wasteful: What did you work so hard to bring to life though taking a full animation-ish approach ? Did it need or deserve or should have had that much effort put into it to make it lively esp through this means of added frames instead of other tricks?

6/10 for at least half of this overall mediocre movie being good owing to its high activity situational and physical comedy. I'd recommend a viewing of this keeping aside personal disappointment because the production’s novelty is worth experiencing for those that like such niche efforts, sakugabros, or 4C followers that’ll actually be the people to mainly turn up on this title’s page and maybe read this review. For anyone else, I’m not that convinced.