Another World: a violent, fantastical Hong Kong animation

The 2012 adaptation of David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas comes to mind when watching the animation Another World (2025), another visually extravagant, century-hopping epic about reincarnation, itself adapted from Saijo Naka’s novel Sennenki: Thousand-year Journey of an Oni. Like Cloud Atlas co-directors the Wachowskis, Hong Kong director Tommy Kai Chung Ng creates something cohesive and exciting from merging multiple influences for his feature debut. 
 
Another World is the name of one of the film’s primary locations: a pastel-hued afterlife stopover for recently deceased humans. There operate small spirits called soul keepers whose job is to guide the dead to their reincarnation. The dead’s unresolved resentments must be left behind in the netherworld with their other memories, lest they fester in a new life and risk transforming the human into a “wrath”, a violent monster that emerges when seeds of evil blossom. 
 
The story jumps around between incidents spanning hundreds of years, as a soul keeper named Gudo (voiced by Chung Suet-Ying) tries to pacify the anger building in various people he travels to the human world to observe. One such soul, a young dead girl, becomes a source of fascination for Gudo as he learns about human emotion. The thread connecting all these lives will reveal itself in the film’s finale. 
 
In style, setting designs and tone, Chung Ng’s film seems in debt to fantasy anime of a certain ilk, in particular some of Studio Ghibli’s output, but with brutally violent detours recalling the Japanese mega-franchise Demon Slayer. Considering the infrequency of major feature animation from Hong Kong, it makes good business sense to produce a film that could be mistaken for a product from East Asia’s most lucrative and exportable animation industry, though Chung Ng and his team avoid a few common visual markers of anime to make their character animation distinctive. 
 
It’s especially evident with the minimalist designs of the human characters’ eyes. While they have pupils, the whites of their eyeballs are replaced by the surrounding skin colour. Making the eyes less easy to read lends the film’s quieter moments a curious intimacy, whereby you’re placing yourself in the characters’ headspace to glean their feelings, rather than having glitters of tears instantly spell out emotional responses. Always wearing an unchanging mask, Gudo, too, is an enigma at times; a thematically resonant design choice for a being on a thousand-year journey to understand human emotions himself. It’s one of many clever touches in this imaginative adventure, which one hopes is just the start of Hong Kong animation gaining a greater standing on the international stage. 

► Another World is in UK cinemas now.