During the largest film festival in the world, the cinema continues. This Wednesday, May 13, two fantastic Japanese animated films hit theaters with a singular aesthetic delight: “Junk World” and “ChaO.”
Gone are the days when Japanese animated cinema was treated with the greatest disdain (not to mention racism) to be lumped in with its most mediocre animated series churned out on a budget for TV programs that sometimes remixed them into something else entirely! Today, “Japanimation” is recognized for what it is since Taiji Yabushita’s “The White Serpent” in 1958, or Isao Takahata’s “Horus, Prince of the Sun” a decade later: a major landscape in animation that never fails to dazzle with its magnificence, inventiveness, and radicalism, often mad, in its creations. Two films attest to this magnificently, and in very different ways, starting this Wednesday: “Junk World” by Takahide Hori and “ChaO” by Takahide Hori.
Junk World: Animated insanity frame by frame
Takahide Hori astounded us five years ago with the madness of his first feature film “Junk Head,” both in terms of its chaos and its even wilder production. Like a challenge he set for himself in his forties, this former art student, making a living as an interior decorator, decided to tinker alone in his corner, with no experience in the matter, to create a science fiction film in stop-motion animation (24 frames per second!). Completed in 2017, “Junk Head” toured festivals and mesmerized audiences everywhere before its 2020 release in Japan, where it has since gained a cult following.
“Junk World,” premiering today, is not a sequel, nor truly a prequel, but unfolds in the same cyberpunk universe populated by genetically (very, very) modified humans, colonial clones, and more or less rebellious robots. A group embarking on an exploration in an underground world falls into an ambush turning into a massacre and ends up trapped in a quantum time loop (or some impossible thing in that taste) reliving the same events over and over again… Well, not quite the same events.
More than the story (richer in action and characters than “Junk Head,” which stuck to a straightforward narrative of a nightmarish exploration, but not much clearer), it’s the overall delirium that both astounds and captivates. “Junk World” regurgitates, with humor, an entire culture of horrific, organic, and insane imagery spanning from Bosch to Nihei, via Burroughs, Jodorowsky, Otomo, Tsukamoto, Quay, Giger, Tippett, and Cronenberg. That’s a lot? You haven’t seen anything yet!
ChaO: An explosion of colors and wild ideas
Known as the most radical house in Japanese animation, Studio 4°C specializes in graphic and narrative originality. They are responsible for works such as “Mind Game,” “Tekkonkinkreet,” “Children of the Sea,” and “Fortune Favors Lady Nikuko.”
Winner of the Jury Prize at the 2025 Annecy Festival, “ChaO” is the first feature film directed by seasoned animator Yasuhiro Aoki, who, at the suggestion of Studio 4°C’s co-founder, very freely adapted Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.” On paper, it doesn’t seem wildly original, especially considering the two brilliant Japanese variations on the theme with Miyazaki’s “Ponyo” and Yuasa’s “Lu Over the Wall.” But only on paper.
In a slightly futuristic world where humans and mermaids coexist with varying degrees of happiness, an ordinary office worker meets ChaO, a mermaid princess far from Disney’s cute standards. Without fully understanding what is happening, the young man quickly finds himself married to the whimsical fish…
With breathtaking graphic freedom, “ChaO” varies styles and scales from one character to another, saturates colors with shimmering shades, fills the set with amusing details, presents absurd gags, burlesque scenes, and frenzied chases. It’s a burst of whimsical visual ideas that might give you sea sickness. But just when you feel dizzy (if only to give your eyes a rest), the film changes course and touches your heart. Beneath the furious madness, a pure heart, and we melt!
