It grabs you by the collar in the first ten minutes and never lets you settle back into your seat. Stephan is the most boring man alive, a shipbuilding company drone with his emotional shutters welded closed, and ChaO proposes marriage to him before he can even process what a mermaid princess is doing in his day. The comedy runs on that mismatch: her total, unembarrassed sincerity versus his instinct to apologize his way out of the room. Studio 4°C animates it with the kind of rubbery, physics-be-damned character acting most romance films would never risk, so ChaO's every mood swing warps the frame around her. There's no tragic backstory waiting to ambush you, no war between species to solve, just a guy slowly admitting he'd rather be loved loudly than left alone quietly. Annecy's jury saw it. Watch it and you'll get why.

In a future where humans and mermaids live side by side, Stephan works a quiet, unremarkable job at a shipbuilding company. His routine is thrown into chaos when Chao, a princess of the mermaid kingdom, suddenly asks him to marry her. Before he can make sense of any of it, Stephan is living with the impulsive and wholehearted Chao. Her sincere affection slowly wears down the emotional defenses he has built up, and a surprising, heartfelt romance takes shape. Their marriage turns him from an ordinary employee into a figure of worldwide fascination, and later he tells a young reporter what their life together was really like.