This overlong musical animated feature from TV anime auteur Masaaki Yuasa centres around 14-year-old Kai (Shôta Shimoda), a music nerd and city kid who joins a rock band with his new classmates after moving to the Japanese fishing town of Hinashi. The band meet an adorable, jelly-faced mermaid named Lu (Kanon Tani) who is drawn to their human music, and feared by the local people. It’s a little shouty (musical numbers notwithstanding), but there’s lots to admire about Yuasa’s style, which is flat and free-form, with loose lines and a curvy, cartoonish, distinctly 2D quality reminiscent of the animation that emerged from the 1920s and 30s (and, in one surreal scene at the end of the film, late-period Matisse).
