Like a puppy in the throes of the zoomies, ChaO (opening in theaters today) never rests. This turbo-charged animated fairy tale from first-time director Yasuhiro Aoki is a capital-C Cartoon, exploiting the elasticity of its medium with a relentless creative drive. From opening barrage to postscript, the viewer is bombarded by information and by sheer sensation, from the whizbang onomatopoeia of its sound design to visuals that playfully disrupt its own “rules,” as when people tossed into the air carom off the skyscrapers of Tokyo like balls in a giant pachinko machine. Even before the story’s most fantastic element surfaces, we’re soaring in a world without a tether, where everyone and everything is exaggerated, and the only course of action is to surrender to the surreality.
The plot is framed through the eyes of a harried journalist who is late for one scoop but stumbles upon another when he encounters a man loading gear on a fishing boat. This individual turns out to be Stephan, a celebrity years earlier when he became the first man to marry a mermaid: In the world of ChaO, merpeople and humans have long been known to share Earth’s real estate. As the reporter boards Stephan’s vessel, its owner shares his peculiar story, a kind of inverted Beauty and the Beast in which the mariner, saved by a bubbly orange-ish fish that dwarves him in size, must fall in love with the piscine creature in order to appreciate her beautiful human form.
At the time of his encounter with the mermaid, who goes by the name ChaO, tensions between the homo sapiens and merpeople camps were fraught, in part because the boating corporation for which Stephan works, as a lowly deckhand, has been responsible for many mermen injuries on account of its cheap, dangerous propellers. Stephan, an engineer at heart, has a plan to prevent such collisions, but his avaricious employer will only fund it if Stephan maintains his high-publicity, touch-and-go courtship with ChaO.
Just as there’s a lot going on visually, the movie is a jumble of narrative ideas as well. Is it a workplace satire? An offbeat romantic comedy? An environmental allegory? A literal fish-out-of-water story? The answer to all of these is “yes, and.” ChaO might have benefited from a more laser-focused approach to any one of these archetypes, but as an appreciator of what’s been favorably dubbed “slow cinema,” I’m probably not the ideal audience for this chaos machine in the first place; my favorite animated films are slow burners such as Waking Life, Waltz With Bashir, and Anomalisa.
But I also love the Spider-Verse franchise for all of its muchness, and ChaO doesn’t cohere as elegantly as those spectacles, in part because it ultimately leans on familiar structures in an unfamiliar environment. Boy gets girl, boy loses girl at just the right screen-tested moment, and you can probably fill in the rest. If there’s an emotional center to ChaO, I never found it amid the barrage of audiovisual data. Ultimately, if you believe as I do that this wild adventure ultimately misses its mark, it’s not because it goes too far into a dadaist fantasia; it’s because it settles for the commonplace.
ChaO opens Thursday, April 9 at theaters including Cinemark Paradise 24 in Davie and AMC Aventura 24.
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