ChaO
Ajyal Feature Film Competition - Doha Film Festival 2025
Yasuhiro Aoki / Japan / 2025 / 90 min / Colour / DCP / In Japanese / Arabic, English subtitles
Themes: Animation
Rated: 
Parental guidance is advised for viewers under the age of 13. Individuals under the age of 13 are not admitted into cinemas unless accompanied by an individual aged 18 or older.
Dates And Timings
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Mon, Nov 24 - 5:30 PM
Katara Building 12 - Frame 2- Fee: 0 QAR
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Wed, Nov 26 - 9:30 AM
Katara Building 12 - Frame 2- Fee: 0 QAR
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Thu, Nov 27 - 6:00 PM
Vox Cinemas, Doha Festival City, Screen 6- Fee: 50 QAR
Description
▶ Watch Trailer
A mild-mannered shipyard office worker is blindsided when a mermaid princess proposes marriage and moves in. Their new life is messy and joyous, lost in translation one moment, disarmingly sincere the next. Around them, a near-future city tilts between regulation and possibility; an official willing to harm fish for profit embodies a brittle idea of progress, while the couple test another: that mutual regard can redraw civic space itself. Lovingly crafted in traditional hand-drawn animation, faces breathe, hair and hands carry intention, and shifts in light reveal the tremor of feeling beneath the humour. Style serves meaning: when characters from different worlds share the frame, the composition itself becomes a conversation about balance and attention.
Rather than scoring easy points against power, the film employs wit and genuine tenderness to move us toward patience, toward the work of understanding, and toward a future wide enough for more than one way of being. What lingers is not just the arc from shyness to devotion, but the idea that love can serve as a model for how communities might reconcile competing needs without erasing differences. In a time of entrenched divides, the story offers a bright, humane rejoinder, suggesting that tolerance is less a slogan than a daily practice of care.
Director
Yasuhiro Aoki
Yasuhiro Aoki is a Tokyo-based animation director who began at Studio Live and has worked at STUDIO 4°C since the 2000s. He is known for fluid character animation and meticulous detail, with expressive use of light and shadow. Selected works include the shorts ‘Honey Tokyo’ (2010), ‘Batman Gotham Knight: In the Darkness’ (2008) and ‘Amazing Nuts!: Kung Fu Love’ (2006).
Credits
- Producer
- Eiko Tanaka
- Music
- Takatsugu Muramatsu