Fish Story opens in 2012 in a deserted Japanese city; in the sky overhead hangs a comet racing towards Earth. Impact is in five hours, and the population has fled to high land to escape the predicted tidal wave – even though they’ll all die anyway, because the comet’s going to blast the entire world to pieces. The city’s not entirely deserted, though. One man remains; a man in a wheelchair knocking over racks of bikes, just because he can. Then, out of the silence, he hears music blaring from a record shop and goes to investigate this unlikely assertion of life. Inside, he finds two men, and tries to convince them to give up all hope. They refuse, and claim an obscure punk record will save the world. Fish Story is the tale of just how this unlikely eventuality comes to pass.

The film mashes together various mini-stories that play out in the years between the recording of the original track and said track’s salvation of all humanity. The first tale, chronologically, is that of the punk band who create the super-charged, largely nonsensical song. No one gets their music and they split in 1975, just before punk is ‘invented’ by the Sex Pistols; to console themselves, they dream up a crazy story about how, in the future, their song saves the world. The track includes a minute’s silence, and over the years dark rumours gather around it: it’s said that during the silence, those with sixth sense can hear a woman scream. One night, a weedy boy, already spooked by tales of Satanic songs-played-backwards and the strange predictions of a psychic girl he’s just met, is driving home alone when the song stops and out of the darkness rises a terrible scream... Another time, another place, and a schoolgirl falls asleep on a ferry, missing her stop; she wakes up in the middle of a hijack but luckily also on board, working as a chef, is a brave ‘champion of justice’, who’s been learning martial arts all his life in case of just such a drama. Back in the present, and that comet’s getting closer...

Fish Story runs riot through the years, and for most of its length there’s little to link the various stories except for snatches of the song and occasional appearances by a villainous cult leader who has built his life around gloomy predictions of apocalypse. It’s just his type that the film sets up against, and the whole is driven by an anarchic punk spirit – not of nihilism, but of kicking against the world’s standardised meanness and pessimism. At the very end, the individual stories resolve themselves and the preposterous coincidences that will lead to the saving of the world tumble into place. A ‘fish story’ is one that is marked by its extravagant exaggeration, and this film revels in its wild invention while maintaining that, no matter how ridiculous, you should never doubt the power of a good old happy ending. It’s fantastically written, winningly warm-hearted and, despite a seam of dark comedy, ultimately elating. If only all stories were this gleefully life-affirming.