ChaO

A pretty fantastic experience from a veteran animator who worked on many things, clearly including Mind Game and the early Digimon Hosoda animated films. This is a beautiful romcom that is bold to a fault, over the top, charming and not annoyingly message-y when it comes to environmental themes. It suffers only from being a bit predictable, hardly ever giving the audience a moment to breathe, and in my opinion short changing me on cutesy fish girl+man dating scenes. I doubt I'm the only one who thinks Chao is cuter as a fishy with timbs than as a shark toothed pixie girlXD. Very minor gripes for me though, this was an incredible work of art that was apparently 7 years worth of hard effort from a bunch of seasoned anime industry folks. Even though it definitely makes one think of Ponyo it differentiates itself enough and reassures that there is a Japanese animated movie industry full of talent outside of Ghibli. If you skip this and see Mario Galaxy instead you ought to be beaten with a stick!