There are Japanese folktales that speak of the sea as if it were the afterlife. Time passes strangely at the bottom; a fisherman once rode a turtle straight to the Dragon King's palace on the ocean floor, only to discover that, upon his return to land a few days later, 300 years had passed instead. But, in the deep blue, there's almost always a beautiful princess – and it's this part of the story that the upcoming film ChaO twists like taffy into a romcom.
ChaO is the first full-length film from veteran animator Yasuhiro Aoki, who's worked on everything from Naruto, Digimon, and Neon Genesis Evangelion to Sailor Moon. Time passes strangely at the bottom of the ocean: A GKids representative addresses the audience at a recent premiere at the Japan Society in New York, ahead of the film's Japanese release on August 15, and tells us ChaO took seven years to make. ChaO was apparently assembled using 100,000 hand-drawn frames, and the result is a funny fairytale that comes from love as much as it is about it.
