This article contains major spoilers for Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island.
If I had a nickel for every time I consumed a piece of media about mermaid legends and folklore in the year 2026, well, I would have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot, but it’s certainly made me feel like mermaids are making their way back into the cultural zeitgeist. The first piece of media, for those who might be wondering, is the awesome Paranormasight: The Mermaid’s Curse, which I devoured over a weekend in a feverish blitz.
If you’ve checked out the weekly Retcon newsletter (creatively named Retconned, heh) in the past month or so, I briefly share some anecdotes about restarting my Japanese language journey and how I’m approaching it differently this time than I did in university. One of the things I’m trying to do daily now is have some sort of immersion block, where I’d consume a piece of native Japanese media and see how much I can absorb in a fairly low stakes way. Playing Final Fantasy X in Japanese was part of my immersion tactics, and so is watching an episode of Chiikawa each day.
When I first started, I didn’t know much about Chiikawa apart from the fact that it’s the hot new mascot in Japan that everyone is going crazy over. I don’t know what kind of animal it is either. I just describe it as “some sort of floof”. Anyway, I’m about 16 episodes into the anime, and by and large, it comes across as your typical cutesy kids’ show with cute floofs doing cute things. The cat-looking Hachiware is a favorite of mine, and over the past few weeks, I’ve grown to enjoy Chiikawa as my daily seven-minute ritual where I get to watch these floofs weed out grass and eat tons of delicious food.
So naturally, when I heard that there was a Chiikawa movie coming out, I just had to watch it. It’s all for Hachiware 兄さん! While I’d realized very early on that Chiikawa could have a bit of an edge to it, I was wholly unprepared for the moral ambiguity and discomfort that I was in for with the movie.
The Secret of the Mermaid Island centers around our main characters going to the titular island, which is under attack by a Siren and its mermaids. For reasons that will become clear later, the Siren is eating up the residents one by one, and two residents in particular (named Hitoha and Futaba) hope that the newcomers can help subjugate the Siren and protect the island. Our heroes step up to the plate of course, but things aren’t as simple as they seem. We later learn that one of the Siren’s mermaids was eaten by one of the island’s residents, and Siren will stop at nothing to find the culprit.
It’s a sinister setup on its own. The Mermaid Island used to be blessed by the Siren and the mermaids themselves, as their crops thrived and helped to foster a peaceful life. Yet the temptation of mermaid flesh is always there, as eating the flesh would grant you eternal life. Right off the bat, the audience is left wondering who could be so selfish as to compromise the island’s way of life for such a self-centered goal.
The movie disguises itself with Chiikawa‘s usual veneer of cute floofs doing cute things, but as you get towards the end of the movie, you’ll start to realize that perhaps those comparisons with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment aren’t so far off the mark after all. Never mind the fact that the antagonist Siren casually sings about locking up the culprit in a cage and leaving them to rot in a dark place for all eternity, or that it’s later revealed that Hitoha was the one who killed the mermaid — shockingly depicted as an off-screen bludgeoning with nothing but shadows and repeated, uncomfortable thwacking sounds that leave way too much to the imagination.
Hitoha and Futaba had read about the powers of mermaid flesh in a cookbook, and stupidly decided to go fishing for mermaids in the sea. They catch a glimpse of Siren playing with its three mermaids close by, but things go awry when Siren jumps and dives, inadvertently destroying Hitoha and Futaba’s boat with its powerful tail slam. Futaba is critically injured, and out of desperation, Hitoha kills a mermaid in hopes of saving Futaba.
It’s the mature themes and moral ambiguity that come after that really hit hard. Upon being revived with the mermaid flesh, Futaba immediately realizes that eternal life means outliving the entire island and eventually being left alone. They then force Hitoha to eat the flesh as well, and the two become partners in crime. The Crime and Punishment cues are most obvious during key scenes where the duo attempt to sacrifice their own wellbeing to protect our main characters from Siren. Up to this point, they’ve watched their friends get eaten one by one, and things come to a breaking point in a final confrontation with Siren, where Hitoha and Futaba are able to stop the Siren in her tracks for just a moment so the curry plan can come into play.
It’s also not lost on me that artist and creator Nagano has opted for Chiikawa to be the only one who learns the truth. When Chiikawa discovers the mermaid scale in Hitoha and Futaba’s home, they realize who the culprits are. In a poignant scene where the whole island is celebrating their victory around a campfire, Chiikawa starts walking over with the intention of confronting them. As they approach the pair, however, they stop short, realizing that the pair’s bond and love are what drove them to such heinous acts. And Chiikawa — despite being, in my opinion, the most worthless and dumbest floof of the main trio — recognizes that they, too, share such a bond with Hachiware and Usagi. And wouldn’t Chiikawa do the same for them, if push came to shove?
Alright, I realize it’s possible I may be giving this little white floof too much credit here, but given how the rest of the movie has played out, I think that’s what I’m meant to take away from that scene.
Either way, Chiikawa displays empathy for Hitoha and Futaba, and decides to keep their secret for them. That, on its own, is heavy as hell. That’s like Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul levels of moral ambiguity and anguish right there. It also makes the movie’s theme song feel creepier and more unsettling in hindsight, especially as Hachiware sings “いつまでも”, which roughly translates to “forever” when he sings about being with his friends forever. Well, I guess if you eat some of that sweet mermaid flesh, you really will be with them forever, huh?
It’s creepy that the song — meant to be wholesome and heartwarming and reinforce the power of friendship — takes on this double meaning after the big reveal. You realize it’s not just some generic friendship song about Chiikawa and friends; it’s really about Hitoha and Futaba’s shared guilt, and how they’re forced to live with their sins forever.
To bring it all home, The Secret of the Mermaid Island denies its audience any type of closure you’d typically expect from a kids movie that parents take their children to. After the movie cheerfully informs the audience to stay behind for a post-credits scene, we see Hitoha and Futaba arrive on a new island where they presumably plan on building a new home for themselves. After all, Siren knows who the culprit is after their last confrontation. She may have been incapacitated by the curry, but she’s just down, not out.
The movie ends with a shot of Siren and her remaining two mermaids swimming rapidly towards the island that Hitoha and Futaba are on. The screen brutally cuts to black right after that.
There’s really no takeaway or lesson or moral to be learned here. Try as I might, I honestly couldn’t tell you what lesson a kid watching this movie was supposed to learn. I guess if I really had to make something up, it’s that you shouldn’t be greedy and chase eternal life? After all, that quest is what got Futaba injured in the first place. But even that doesn’t feel satisfying.
This is intentional of course. Just as Chiikawa chose to keep Hitoha and Futaba’s secret, we, too, must live with the discomfort and the fact that, in life, we can never truly know what’s right and what’s wrong.
