by Rollin Bishop

Do you want to marry a fish? Why would anyone want to marry a fish? This is the chief throughline of ChaO, the anime rom-com feature film from Studio 4°C and director Yasuhiro Aoki. There's also a frame story, more sight gags based on character designs alone than I can easily count, robots, a giant battle using gorgeously animated water, an elaborate dance, and… well, you get the idea.

ChaO is a visual buffet, and we're all invited.

While it takes a minute to set up its premise, it boils down to: shipbuilder Stephan somehow ends up engaged to mermaid princess Chao due to a confusing series of events, and the rest is a fish-out-of-water story about the two of them trying to work it out. And I do mean that literally. Chao, as a giant goldfish, walks around on land wearing Kingdom Hearts-style shoes on her tailfin.

There's the overall relationship problems between people and merfolk, the fact that she's royalty and learning to live among the decidedly-not-royal, and the whole mystery as to why Chao even proposed to Stephan in the first place — which happens while his boss's boat gets damaged thanks to a massive wave caused by Chao's father, Stephan nearly drowning in the process.

It's a lot. The fantastical worldbuilding isn't interested in explaining the "why" for nearly anything. What's the deal with the merfolk? Why are there people with giant heads and small bodies but then people with normal proportions like Stephan? How do the water highways work? At the risk of sounding increasingly like the old Simpsons gag, it's best to just assume that a wizard did it and move on.

I don't necessarily need to know, and that's just fine, because ChaO isn't interested in telling me. The movie is much more interested in small character moments like Stephan constantly hitting his head on the same hanging pot as he leaves his home, with the occasional extremely splashy sequence. It helps that ChaO is absolutely beautiful and vibrant regardless or whether it's in motion, as it smoothes over the slightly messy plot.

The stuffed-to-the-gills nature of ChaO does begin to make a lot more sense when you know that it's been in the works over seven years and some change. It feels a bit like Aoki crammed just about everything he wanted to do into a single work, which sort of tracks with what he's been saying about the project.

"In a sense, it's really like two opposite ends of one coin. ChaO feels like it's the culmination of all my work, but then it's also something very different from what I was thinking I was going to make," Aoki told Aftermath as part of an interview.

Does ChaO really need that second act mech battle? (This is not a joke.) Does it really need to then later justify why it had a second act mech battle? It feels almost entirely out of the blue when it first occurs, and the movie certainly tries to make the pieces fit in the end even if it does sometimes feel like maybe three or four different puzzles had been stuffed into the same box.

Even so, it's hard to not be charmed. While consistently out of place, the various sequences do work in isolation, and the colors and flow of ChaO's animation impress at every possible opportunity the joy of life and movement. It comes across as deeply unserious and spontaneous, even when dealing with life and death matters, until a sudden realization that actually, all of that matters. ChaO wants you to have fun with it, and it's tough to resist its attempts.

The movie is undeniably messy. Then again so is love, and 'messy' isn't a value judgment. There's good mess, and there's bad mess. Bad mess can be cuts with unclear perspective, moving objects with no reasonable continuity, fights with flash and no substance that leave you recognizing what you just saw as an entity but not actually understanding it.

ChaO is good mess, the more I think about it. And appearances can be deceiving: a core theme in ChaO. While Stephan complains about his bride being a fish, there are flashes that show, on the inside, she is more conventionally beautiful. But this more humanoid form is only possible to maintain when Chao herself feels comfortable enough, which can only really occur when Stephan begins to love her for who she is regardless — fish or no.

For me, I've come to learn to love this fish.

ChaO is in North American theaters, distributed by GKIDS, April 10.