The Faces of Adults Leaving a Cute Movie
✦ The Box Office at a Glance
Korea and Japan
Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island, which opened on September 30, 2026, passed 1 million cumulative viewers at 3:30 p.m. on October 9, ten days after release. That is according to the Korean Film Council's integrated ticketing network.
It was two days faster than the 12 days it took last September's Chainsaw Man: The Movie – Reze Arc to reach 1 million.
The day before release there were 210,388 advance reservations, a 41.4% booking rate that ranked first, and in Japan, where it opened on July 24, it recorded 11.78 million cumulative viewers and 17.2 billion yen in box office revenue as of October 6.
What's more interesting than the numbers is the faces of the audience. One report said women made up 72% of the audience in CGV's reservation analysis, and one outlet wrote that the expressions of adults leaving the theater are strangely complicated.
The reason, it said, is that quite heavy questions about labor and survival, desire and guilt sit inside a world tightly wrapped in cuteness. That is where the reason adults cry at a cute movie lies.
A Record of the Small, Cute World
✦ The Source Material
Nagano's Chiikawa
Chiikawa's creator is Nagano, who began serializing it on X (formerly Twitter) in 2020.
In Korea it is known as Meonjakgwi, short for a Korean phrase meaning "something small and cute." The paperbacks have reached volume 8, released in November 2025, and cumulative circulation has passed 4.6 million copies.
The official X account passed 5.49 million followers as of September 2026, and Chiikawa won the grand prize at the 2026 Japan Character Awards, entering the Hall of Fame.
✦ The Three Leads
Who goes to the island
The film's official synopsis begins like this. While Chiikawa and Hachiware are relaxing in the plaza, Usagi arrives with a flyer inviting them to a special island.
Tempted by the promise that an easy subjugation on the island will pay a hundredfold reward, the group sets off for the island, and a suspicious subjugation mission to uncover the secret hidden there begins.
The leads are Chiikawa, who cries easily but is brave, the bright and positive Hachiware, and the quirky Usagi.
What Cuteness Does in Our Bodies
✦ Three Studies on Cuteness
In chronological order
Psychology has treated cuteness quite seriously. In 2009, Glocker and colleagues showed adults photos of infant faces whose features had been manipulated.
Faces with stronger baby-like features were rated cuter, and the motivation to care for them was also stronger. It was the first experiment to show that the effect of baby-like features also appears in real infant faces.
In a 2012 experiment by Nittono and colleagues, people who viewed cute images performed tasks requiring focused attention more carefully.
The interpretation is that the positive emotion cuteness triggers connects with approach motivation and narrows attention so that things are handled meticulously. Looking at something cute doesn't just loosen the heart, it makes behavior calmer.
In 2015, Aragon and colleagues summarized that very strong positive experiences produce, along with positive expressions, expressions normally reserved for negative emotions, such as tears.
The urge to squeeze something cute tightly belongs here too, and the study tested the hypothesis that these expressions function to regulate overflowing emotion. So laughing and then choking up in front of something cute is not strange.
A Cute but Harsh World
✦ How Adults Reacted
Who said what
In Chiikawa's world, the cuteness is only the outward appearance.
A domestic outlet reported that The Economist analyzed the characters making a living through day labor such as pulling weeds, sticking stickers, and subjugating monsters, and failing certification exams, as resembling the gig economy reality of young people living in an anxious age.
Nikkei reportedly said that the stories of characters living as day laborers struck a deep chord with Koreans in their twenties who suffer from a tough job market and high prices.
One 45-year-old male fan in Japan analyzed for himself why a middle-aged man with social experience is so captivated by those small, cute creatures.
His conclusion was that it is because they, in their cute form, live in a world where, just like us, working is no guarantee of being rewarded.
One outlet summed it up: some people see themselves in the timid Chiikawa, and some find comfort in Hachiware, who never loses positivity to the end.
The Comfort Small, Weak Beings Give
✦ How the Comfort Forms
This post's reading
Putting the pieces so far together, you can read it like this. A cute appearance stirs the wish to take care of someone. But Chiikawa is a being living in a world where working is no guarantee of reward, so that feeling turns toward someone like me.
For adults, Chiikawa becomes a mirror that reflects their own story.
That's why adults laugh and then cry at a cute movie. They get comfort from seeing a being smaller and weaker than themselves endure to the end, and at the same time, through the wish to look after that being, they end up looking after themselves.
That is why the faces leaving the theater are strangely complicated.
Even in its second week, theaters are handing out character posters and special postcards. What Chiikawa meets on the island is something you can check for yourself in the theater.
Well then, shall we begin today's adventure?
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