Above: Toho’s official Japanese trailer for Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island. If the embed won’t play, it’s here on YouTube.
While DC’s Clayface was busy winning the American box office this weekend, it was finishing fourth in South Korea, and the film beating it was about three small, round creatures who keep taking terrible jobs. Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island topped the Korean chart for a third weekend running over 23 to 25 October, with 320,312 admissions and 44.7 per cent of weekend ticket sales, according to Korean Film Council figures reported by the Korean press. That took its total to 2,248,156 admissions since it opened on 30 September. Second place went to the local thriller The Assassin(s) with 68,241, just ahead of the opening weekend of Yeon Sang-ho’s Paradise Lost on 67,708. Clayface managed 48,247. Chiikawa sold more than four times as many tickets as the runner-up and more than six times as many as Gotham’s mud-man, which is not a sentence anybody at Warner Bros. expected to read.
Japan got there first. The film opened in Japan on 24 July through Toho and had taken ¥18.1bn from about 12.4 million admissions by 18 October, according to Oricon. That makes it the biggest film of 2026 in Japan, ahead of this year’s Detective Conan film, which normally wins that race in a canter. It is directed by Kei Oikawa and animated by CygamesPictures, and Chiikawa’s creator, the artist known as Nagano, wrote the story and screenplay. It runs 99 minutes, which is a long stretch for a franchise whose TV episodes last about a minute each.
Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island. ©nagano / 2026 Chiikawa the Movie Film Partners.
For anyone who has missed it so far, Chiikawa began life on social media. Nagano’s manga Chiikawa: Nanka Chiisakute Kawaii Yatsu (roughly “something small and cute”) grew out of a 2017 tweet and has been serialised on X since January 2020. Kodansha’s collected volumes had sold more than 3.6 million copies by late 2024, and Doga Kobo’s TV anime, in one-minute episodes, has run on Fuji TV’s breakfast show Mezamashi TV since April 2022. Chiikawa, Hachiware and Usagi look as if they’ve escaped from a stationery shop, but their world is closer to a zero-hours contract with monsters. They earn their keep weeding and hunting chimeras, both of which require qualifications, and the second of which can kill you. There is an exam for the weeding licence. Chiikawa keeps failing things. It’s adorable, and slightly harrowing.
The film adapts the “Siren” storyline that Nagano posted in 2023. Usagi turns up with a flyer stuck to its face inviting everyone to a special island, where the work is easy monster-hunting, the rewards are big and the food is free. Rakko-sensei, the series’ sea-otter master hunter, smells a rat but goes along anyway. Naturally the island has a giant Siren that has been carrying off the residents, and the job turns out to be a good deal worse than the advert promised. Reports from Japan say audiences on social media took to calling it a horror film, and some children came out in tears. British readers raised on Watership Down will know the feeling.
That mix of cute and bleak seems to be why it has landed so hard in Korea. The Korea Herald reports that nearly 70 per cent of ticket buyers at the CGV chain are in their twenties and thirties, many of whom see their own scramble for decent, safe work in Chiikawa’s run of dodgy gigs. “Honestly, it’s cute before anything else, but there’s this dark streak running through it,” one 28-year-old office worker told the paper. In China, fans call the series “digital ibuprofen”. Genre fiction has always known that the best way to say something unbearable is to have a rabbit say it.
There’s no word yet on a UK release. The film has been rolled out across Asia, and Fuji TV is offering it to international buyers, while Sentai Filmworks handles the TV series outside Asia. An English dub of the TV episodes has reportedly been running on the official English YouTube channel since 1 October. If a British distributor is reading this: the audience is out there, it has a job it hates, and it would very much like to see the little guy pass his weeding exam.
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