Since scooping the Jury Award at Annecy last year, the accolades for this Studio 4°C (Mind Game, Tekkonkinkreet) masterpiece have been snowballing. 

ChaO is a dizzying, hand-drawn riot - glorious proof that animation remains the absolute frontier for the weird, the wonderful, and the completely unclassifiable.

Set in a vibrant, near-future Shanghai where humans and merpeople navigate a clunky coexistence, the film follows Stephan - a buttoned-up shipyard worker whose life is catapulted into ecstatic chaos when a bubbly mermaid princess proposes marriage. What follows is a psychedelic, slapstick romance that leans into the grotesque and the sublime in equal measure.

With over 100,000 hand-drawn frames, director Yasuhiro Aoki rejects digital polish in favour of lawless, shifting perspectives and characters whose heads change size based on their emotions. It’s a sensory explosion that feels like a love letter to the medium’s anarchic roots. 

Both heartwarming and heartbreaking, ChaO is a genre-defying celebration of love in all its slippery, neon-hued glory.