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Little Mermaid-inspired anime ChaO offers a goldfish in Air Jordans and not much else

An experimental aesthetic can't wash away this fairy tale's rom-com mishaps.

By Elijah Gonzalez  |  April 10, 2026 | 7:00am
Image: GKIDS
Anime Reviews ChaO
Little Mermaid-inspired anime ChaO offers a goldfish in Air Jordans and not much else

Studio 4°C is well-acquainted with the bizarre. From the zany Tekkonkinkreet to Mind Game‘s phantasmagorical spectacle, the studio has long pushed boundaries in a medium where familiar art styles reign supreme. Earlier this year, they put out All You Need Is Kill, which painted the dismal trenches of its source material (previously adapted into Edge Of Tomorrow) with kaleidoscopic splashes of neon blood. That same experimental energy is on display in ChaO, a near-future take on The Little Mermaid where a walking goldfish wearing Air Jordans ends up married to a painfully unlikable everyman who doesn’t remember his salient character motivation until the last few minutes of the movie. A talented animation team does its best to bail water from this sinking ship, but an overreliance on contrivances and slapstick leaves too many holes to plug.

While the fairy tale setup is mostly familiar, the visual style is anything but, as an endearing ugliness crashes into a picturesque water park world. Characters are inexplicably misshapen and strange; some have faces like street-art caricatures, while others are massive or tiny, creating an amusing chaos that defies explanation. Fluid hand-drawn animation captures aquatic dances and the violence of a raging sea, as loose character designs meld with the unpredictability of ocean waves. This project took seven years to come together, and you can see it in lived-in backdrops, with homes both cozy and ramshackle, or in vigorous set pieces where currents move with alarming force. Whether to avoid comparisons with Disney’s take on this folktale, or simply because director Yasuhiro Aoki set the animation team loose, there’s a vitality to the idiosyncratic look of ChaO. Unfortunately, that same sense of imagination doesn’t extend to a central romantic relationship that fizzles away like sea foam.

Set in a near future where humans and mermaids are on bad footing due to recent nautical accidents, a ship engineer named Stefan (Ouji Suzuka) stumbles into a geopolitically consequential situationship. When he locks eyes with the mermaid princess ChaO, it’s love at first sight; well, for her at least. Stefan isn’t interested because his would-be wife “is a fish,” as he not-so-elegantly puts it. Spurred on by a scheming Humpty-Dumpty-shaped CEO and a city that would benefit from improved human-mermaid relations, Stefan is more or less forced into an arranged marriage.

Normally, it would be easy to sympathize with a figure stuck between duty and personal desire, but Saku Konohana’s screenplay isn’t particularly interested in this angle, instead characterizing Stefan as a weak-willed, prejudiced jerk who quite literally stumbles through the first hour of the film. A familiar loop starts: ChaO, voiced with bright charm by Yamada, goes out of her way to accommodate Stefan by acting like a traditional homemaker, only for him to half-heartedly acknowledge her efforts as he reaps the benefits of this situation. By “taking one for the team,” Stefan’s boss has set him up with his dream project at work.

While at first this home situation seems like a setup to interrogate the underlying gender roles at play, as ChaO becomes an accessory to Stefan’s ambitions, the film works in such broad strokes that this dynamic is mostly an afterthought. For the first 60 minutes or so, the pair’s relationship comes off like an extended comedy bit gone wrong, full of slapstick denials, as Stefan backhandedly criticizes his wife’s appearance in a tedious loop that begs for resolution. While living on land, ChaO is stuck in the form of a large, round fish that acts as a setup for unfunny fat jokes, while when underwater, she’s a traditionally beautiful half-human, half-fish princess. Predictably, Stefan only begins to swoon when he sees his wife’s latter form, which feels at odds with a film that otherwise embraces non-traditional beauty through its idiosyncratic aesthetic. Between the lack of chemistry or consistent humor, there isn’t enough “rom” or “com” to keep this will-they/won’t-they afloat.

As the film reaches its last act, the script finally remembers to introduce a reason to care about this floundering relationship, filling in the gaps of a past tragedy that recontextualizes things in Stefan’s favor. It’s still too little, too late, even though ChaO gets the particularly time-intensive part right, with animation that places us in a near-future of clashing myth and modernity. There’s a maverick aspect to the film’s presentation, as it consciously rejects the homogenized “anime style.” If only its storytelling was similarly ambitious.

Director: Yasuhiro Aoki
Writer: Saku Konohana
Starring: Ouji Suzuka, Anna Yamada, Yūichirō Umehara, Kavka Shishido, Shunsei Ota
Release Date: April 10, 2026

 
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