Another World, 2025.
Directed by Tommy NG Kai Chung.
Featuring the voices of Chung Suet-ying, Christy Choi Hiu-Tung, Louis Cheung, Kay Tse, and Will Or Wai-Lam.
SYNOPSIS:
Gudo, a spirit tasked with guiding souls to their next life, encounters Yuri, a girl whose pent-up anger threatens to turn her into a monster, causing a dangerous imbalance in the universe.
Cinema is all about stepping into another world, but few will match the kind of unbridled creativity and imagination bursting forth from Tommy Kai Chung Ng’s beautifully macabre metaphysical animated epic.
What lies beyond our time on this Earth has preoccupied filmmakers for generations. From The Tree of Life to Disney Pixar’s Soul, and Beetlejuice, the unknown has been brought to life on the big screen ad infinitum. In adapting Naka Saijo’s graphic novel Sennenki: Thousand-Year Journey of an Oni, the debutant director has not only delivered one of the first animated feature films to come out of Hong Kong in over two decades, but Another World should sit comfortably alongside the likes of Ghibli’s Grave of Fireflies in the way it deals with themes of loss and death.
The complexities of this world are broken down into quite a simple set of rules for the film to follow. When someone dies, before they are reincarnated, their souls are escorted through a magical realm known as Another World. Assigned a spirit guide, these transient souls shed the memories of their life, before being ushered through a waterfall to begin their new existence, leaving behind only a piece of string, knotted with the unresolved issues of their existence.
Our glimpse into this world of unlimited string focuses on a spirit named Gudo, who is guiding a young girl named Yuri to her next life, when he quickly becomes intrigued by her human emotions and the insistence that she finds her missing brother. This sends the two of them on an afterlife-encompassing adventure that spans an eternity and more.
With the visual world-building required for such a creatively vibrant landscape, coupled with the ambition of the multi-stranded plot, there’s an initial worry that there may be an imbalance between the two during Another World’s opening salvo. However, twenty minutes into the time-jumps and laying out of the lore of this new world, each vignette feels so seamlessly stitched together and in such a meticulous fashion that it leaves you in awe of the storytelling behind it.
It would have been so easy for the filmmakers to allow the exquisite animation to carry a half-hearted plot forward, but the two elements work in tandem to deliver some breathtaking sequences that also land with an emotional heft.
A death-bed confessional, the heartbreaking fate of a family trapped on a rickety bridge, a scene in a wheat-barn that’s as devastating as the Game of Thrones ‘Red Wedding’, and the horror (oh the horror) of a bowl of soup. They’re threads knotted together with a devastating sadness that lingers long after we’ve been hand-held into the next life.
Much of the film’s heart can be found in the spirit taking us on this journey. Gudo is an imminently likeable creation. A masked sprite, with witch-like hands that belie his gentle personality and a tilted mask adorned with a perma-fixed grin that also provides plenty of contradictions to the depth behind this unreadable façade. His mid-film uttering, delivered wonderfully by Chung Suet-ying, that he can “feel my heart shattering” is one of many moments in which the audience will unavoidably feel the same.
The setting may be fantastical, but there are still enough moments that hold up a mirror to the real world, not least with the creation of the ‘Wraths’. Born from a seed of evil growing insidiously inside a human, they burst forth, transforming the host into a hideous, but often gorgeously rendered monster. Not only are they involved in some of the film’s most impressive set-pieces, they are also a manifestation of hatred, and a warning of the toll that being angry at the world takes on us all. Another World might be rooted in loss and melancholy, but its overall message is one of optimism and new beginnings.
A stunning, layered, multi-generational tale of grief and belief, Another World is an endlessly creative piece of storytelling that will put a knot in your stomach and some hope in your heart.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ / Movie ★ ★ ★ ★ ★
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