{"id":48285,"date":"2026-04-12T05:31:11","date_gmt":"2026-04-12T05:31:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=48285"},"modified":"2026-04-12T05:31:11","modified_gmt":"2026-04-12T05:31:11","slug":"how-gkids-mermaid-anime-came-together","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/?p=48285","title":{"rendered":"How GKIDS Mermaid Anime Came Together"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Cinematic history is littered with stories of man falling in love with mermaids<\/a>, from \u201cSplash\u201d to Disney\u2019s retelling of \u201cThe Little Mermaid.\u201d But none looked quite like \u201cChaO<\/a>,\u201d a new anime<\/a> film<\/a> released in the U.S. by GKIDS this April.<\/p>\n

Set in a vague but beautifully futuristic world (referred to as \u201c20XX\u201d in a title card) where robots exist and mermaids are a known species in a tenuous peace with humankind, \u201cChaO\u201d follows Stephen, a lowly employee at a shipbuilding company with big dreams nobody takes seriously. When the titular Chao, the daughter of mermaid king Neptunus, suddenly appears in his life proposing marriage to him, the hapless Stephen agrees less out of attraction to the spirited, sweet princess \u2014 who has a gorgeous humanoid form underwater but looks like a big plump goldfish on land \u2014 and more because the marriage\u2019s publicity elevates him to a position of stature that leads to the greenlight of his big supership idea. Still, Chao is besotted with him, and navigating their odd arranged union leads Stephen slowly to learn how to care for someone so different from him. <\/p>\n

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\u201cChaO\u201d is the directorial feature debut of Yasuhiro Aoki, who has worked at animation company Studio4\u00b0C for two decades. Prior to making \u201cChaO,\u201d Aoki served as a key animator for several projects that he said prioritized very realistic, grounded animation styles, such as 2024\u2019s \u201cThe Lord of the Rings: The War of Rohirrim\u201d and the \u201cPsycho-Pass\u201d film series. So for his directorial debut, he wanted to break away from that, resulting in the rubbery, exaggerated, fluid style that makes \u201cChaO\u201d stick out. <\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe as a reaction, I wanted to go in a completely opposite direction,\u201d Aoki told IndieWire in an interview. \u201cBut I know how to make it proper, so it\u2019s really a mix of very exaggerated manga-like expression, as well as a little bit of realism.\u201d <\/p>\n

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To create the world of \u201cChaO,\u201d Aoki took inspiration from a short film he directed for the 2006 Studio4\u00b0C anthology \u201cAmazing Nuts,\u201d titled \u201cKung Fu Love,\u201d which features a similarly impressionistic art style filled with loose-limbed characters. For the city Stephen and Chao live in, Aoki visited Shanghai during a location scouting trip, and was struck by how much more futuristic he found the city compared to those in Japan. From the sights he saw during the trip, he created the painterly backdrops that dot the film, which depict a twinkly metropolis that\u2019s slightly different from our own while still warmly familiar. <\/p>\n

Dotting the landscapes of \u201cChao\u201d is an eccentric cast of characters that are often bizarre to look at \u2014 and not just the mermaids. Ordinary humans like Stephen\u2019s selfish boss are depicted as giant walking eggs, while others are proportioned like bobble heads. Character designer Hirokazu Kojima told IndieWire that Aoki had rough ideas for the character designs, which were partially inspired by the art style of \u201cDragon Ball Z\u201d creator Akira Toriyama\u2019s classic gag manga \u201cDr. Slump,\u201d that Kojima used as a launching pad for the final designs.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe wanted various kinds of people living in this movie\u2019s world,\u201d Kojima told IndieWire. \u201cBecause it\u2019s about them coexisting alongside one another.\u201d <\/p>\n

For the two drastically different character designs of the title character, Kojima designed the land fish form of Chao as a direct representation of her gigantic personality: she\u2019s a big, awkward, and waddling chunky creature. The more humanoid water form, with her pale skin and flowing water hair, was designed in part to be an \u201cideal\u201d woman, with Stephen learning to love Chao outside of that form serving as a primary arc for him. <\/p>\n

Although \u201cThe Little Mermaid\u201d seems like the most obvious inspiration point for \u201cChaO,\u201d Aoki insists he didn\u2019t really have the fairy tale or the Disney version in mind when creating the film. His main point of reference was actually James Cameron\u2019s \u201cTitanic,\u201d another romance film between star-crossed lovers set on the high seas. Aoki said the 1997 blockbuster directly inspired the film\u2019s framing device, in which a journalist living in a world where mermaids and humans live more closely integrated lives tracks down Stephen to write a story on what happened to him and Chao after they disappeared years before. <\/p>\n

Although \u201cChaO\u201d is primarily a love story between its two main characters, Aoki dots the film\u2019s landscape with lovable supporting characters whose paths intersect with the protagonists. The two pick up best friends, a robot inventor and a kung-fu practicing woman, who have their own romance on the sidelines. The journalist interviewing Stephen in the future has his own flirtations with his mermaid editor. Aoki said he wanted to make the world of the film, as fantastical as it is, feel real and grounded via these character arcs occuring in the background.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I really wanted to make sure about the characters in \u2018Chao\u2019 is that they have their own lives, even though they\u2019re not on screen,\u201d Aoki said. \u201cEven if they go frame out. It\u2019s not like Stefan is living this grand life and then the side characters are just there. Everyone has their own grand life, you know?\u201d <\/p>\n

\u201cChaO\u201d is playing in theaters now.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Cinematic history is littered with stories of man falling in love with mermaids, from \u201cSplash\u201d to Disney\u2019s retelling of \u201cThe Little Mermaid.\u201d But none looked quite…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48286,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48285","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertaonment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48285","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48285"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48285\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/48286"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48285"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48285"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foreignnewstoday.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48285"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}