Fantasia 2026.03: Anime no Bento '26, Break Free, and Unidentified Murder

Pardon if today seems a little more scattered than usual; I left the apartment without my little five-inch square notebook and so wasn't making notes through most of the day, and that's not great when the first couple films of the day are Japanese shorts and new releases; Japanese studios just do not update English-friendly movie databases and there's a lag on the crowd-sourcing as well. I eventually wound up hitting Pharmaprix to grab pen and paper for the last show, but wasn't quick-thinking enough to record or photograph the English credits of Break Free.

Anyway, late start because the early afternoon was filled with panels and such more than screenings, so we kick off at the Museum with the Anime no Bento package:

Five filmmakers for seven films from Japan is a pretty decent turnout, although the scheduling meant there wouldn't be time for a Q&A - these packages are soon after the "My First Fantasia" shows, and genre festival staff in a museum cinema might not exactly specialize in getting families with kids in and out - so there was little time to do more than introduce director Taka Yuki from "Don't Dodge Life", "20001 An Earth Odyssey" creator Taiki Sakurai, "Echo" filmmaker Asuka Dokai, "Foxing" director Takeru Shinokuza, and Eit Mitsufuchi, who did basically everything on "Dust of the Simulacrum".

It didn't quite run late enough to bump into Break Free, with producer Yusuke Suzuki (CHECK), star Akito Fujii, and writer/ director Yu Nakamoto on hand. It was a fun Q&A, even if it was one where you get the sense of how bizarre it must be to fly halfway around the world to show your movie to a huge room of people who speak two different languages from what you understand, standing in front of them while they chatter and a translator occasionally decides a question is for you. Fujii, in particular, often seems to be listening intently for something he could respond to and then giving a very amusing answer when he got the chance.

It was interesting, though, as I gather the film kind of grew from Fujii starting a TikTok where he did dances in character as a yakuza (his character's cover story in the movie), with the studio boys eventually calling Nakamoto in saying they wanted him to write and direct a movie about a dancing gangster, which sounds pretty old Hollywood for a movie built around social media! Fujii, though he's got the look of a gangster, has been dancing since he was young, and said it was a bit of a challenge to dance crappy in earlier scenes. Nakamoto, meanwhile, answered a question about directing action versus dance by noting that sometimes the work of choreography is similar, but with action you are often doing pieces at a time, often with doubles, and camera work very much plotted alongside motion, while dance is often longer shots, no doubles, and the camera reacting to something more spontaneous.

After that there was an hour and a half or so until Unidentified Murder back at the Museum, time to do a little shopping and grab a slice of pizza. I think it might be the only new Hong Kong film at the festival - Blades of the Guardians probably belongs more to the mainland and there are three archive prints/restorations - which seems kind of crazy.

Next up, another couple big gaps on Sunday with Niko, the International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, You Are the Film, and Attack on Paradise. Tuesday looks to be Big Break, Levitating, Hayop Ka!, Someone's Daughter, and either Los Vampires or Solo, depending what the release plans for the former look like.

(And here's a look at how the sausage gets made if you're without a notebook or a pen but know you're not going to remember who is who the next day!)

"Echo"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

One from the "cute fantastical representation" school of animated shorts, "Echo" has a pair of twin children traversing a strange landscape, having crashed there in unusual escape pods of sorts, eager to meet their mother, with one more daring and apparently boasting greater stamina than the other. The twist is that they are as yet unborn, and in the outside world, their mother is not doing well, having lost her husband not long after discovering she was pregnant.

It's a lovely movie to look at, with cute designs that walk up to the border of perhaps overly whimsical without quite crossing it. I'm kind of torn on how directly I'd like weekdays happening with the twins to represent what's going on with the mother - they feel very disconnected here, but link them closer and suddenly there are implications best not examined!


"Future Kid Takara Episode 1: The Child From the Future"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This is very clearly built for children, which is no bad thing, but it can be kind of hard to parse as an adult as a result. It's bright and earnest and full of entertaining designs and transformations, but is it too simplistic? Tough to judge, as an adult, especially without seeing more of the series. Little kids do need introductions to the idea of climate change, though, and they might as well be plain-spoken.

This one looks pretty cute, like it will combine fun adventure with good information, and I kind of love that the girl Takara meets in the past/our present looks like she might be an over-enthusiastic chaos source. The opening has a really nice vibe that feels a bit like it's trying be a bit of a spoof of the sort of thing parents thought was fun as a kid while also trying to be that thing for a new generation.


"20001 An Earth Odyssey"

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

I am here for the joke about "it must have been used for religious rituals" in any form, which is good, because it basically does three of them as a family of alien archeologists examine a playground on an earth where humans have died out. It's a very fine example of how, if a joke is solid enough and you can tweak the execution just enough, there's a lot to work with.

The style of it is admittedly a bit after my time; in American terms it looks like NickToons from the 1990s or so. I suspect that it hits a sweet spot for kids and adults younger than me, even if the main 2001 reference is kind of corny.


"Don't Dodge Life"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

This one's a visually interesting bit of animation, although it probably makes a bit more effort reaching for profundity than it can really manage. Making the abstract concept of life a character can't help but oversimplify something that the other protagonist and potentially the viewer is really struggling with, and filmmaker Taka Yuki seems to struggle with what to do with the idea to make this a story.


"Ambivalent Garden"

Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Two days later, I don't recall anything about this one at all, despite the description and images on the site's pages being striking! Did I nap?


"Foxing: Kitsuné-tsuki"

☆ ☆ ☆ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Write-what-you-know shorts can be dangerous, because they often reveal just how much young artists are pouring into their art to the exclusion of everything else. That's a bit of a weight on "Foxing" for a while, as filmmaker Takeru Shinozuka's avatar Shinano mopes about her work as an animator and how she feels unworthy in a way that's both familiar and also kind of tough to swallow for animation-lovers. We've seen young artists work themselves into and out of funks before, especially with some well-placed encouragement.

Still, the execution is really nice, especially once we meet her kitsune doodle come to life, Koyami. The expected metaphor reveal doesn't have quite so much pressure on it because Shinano has already commented on how much she's like a kitsune in some ways, but I really like the way Koyami is both pure ego and merciless criticism; She's obviously going to be an aspect of Shinano when the mask comes off, but I really like how Shinozuka doesn't separate these traits out into dueling avatars, because not only are both necessary for creating art, but they are more intertwined than usually presented.


"Dust of the Simulacrum"

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

Filmmaker Eit Mitsufuchi pitched "Dust of the Simulacrum" as, among other things, an argument for working in the 3D CGI medium when the animation industry in Japan is still very much focused on a traditional style, but kind of seems a little too meta about it at times? It's not ReBoot or anything, but it's a lost video game character trying to dodge "bugs" that are overrunning a blank landscape, and I don't know if it ever gets beyond being too on-the-nose.

Oddly enough, it's a case where the human characters look nice enough but the bugs look like they could use a little refinement (although, potentially, to look jankier rather than more realistic), and it's another one where what's going on doesn't quite carry the ambition the filmmakers are trying to project.


Odore! Yakuza (Break Free)

☆ ☆ ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Théátre Hall (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Break Free opens with text about how Japan's crackdown on organized crime has more or less crippled the yakuza as a force in Japanese life, and if it goes further, one wonders what the effect will be on pop culture. There will be movies like this, chronicling the fall in ways both serious and comic, but will there eventually be nostalgia for it? As much as filmmaker Yu Nakamoto has a great deal of sympathy for his characters, that doesn't extend to bolstering the institution, which is probably a part of what makes it work.

In it, Kunio (Akito Fujii) is 38 and has been a yakuza for twenty years, but the business of organized crime is not great - he's working as a food delivery driver and longtime comrades are struggling as mascots and trying to catfish - beyond how everybody is filming everything these days and it's very easy to get caught doing violence in public. Insulted by a lack of respect by a civilian, he improvises a sort of dance thing where he doesn't quite hit the guy, and it racks up millions of views. The gang decides to monetize this - an odd scheme where Kunio will present himself online as an influencer who is just cosplaying as a gangster, though the intimidation going on in the background is real - but he'll need some better moves, which means taking classes with former background dancer Marie. She, of course, is very cute, and Kunio starts to wonder if he wants more than a life of crime, even as a less organized but more vicious gang makes a play for their territory.

There's a song and dance man inside every tough guy actor - they weren't doing film noir and kung fu in high school drama class - but I don't know that anyone since James Cagney has really had the chance to be both, no matter how much Hugh Jackman wants to. It's treated as a bit of a joke when they do, and both Break Free and the TikTok channel of star Akito Fujii which inspired the film are playing on the incongruity of a guy who looks like Fujii dancing, but the joke hits so well at its best. Fujii's muscles are not quite bulky but he's not exactly wiry, and even when Kunio cleans up, he kind of looks and sounds like a schlub, so it's genuinely entertaining to see him suddenly move with seeming abandon (though I'm not sure he ever becomes quite so competitive in the dance battles as the plot requires him to be), or have the film suddenly double back and remind you of the gangster life he's trying to hide.

Not that I'd dream of spoiling those moments, especially when the best are a couple layers of absurdity deep, but they bring forth an explosion of laughter, enough to get past how a lot of the movie around them isn't quite so brilliant, coasting a lot on how good the high concept is rather than how any of the details fit together. At their best, though, the filmmakers are great at sending up how goofy something is and then doing a quick pivot to this other very silly thing, catching someone who is just making fun of the one element off guard as the thing they like better isn't spared.

And, underneath it all, this all works because it feels true that the violence of the yakuza is a dead end, even without the steps that the government is taking so that gangsters can't participate in legitimate society. The organization is dying and success requires one to either be completely monstrous (true or not, the yakuza often tried to present themselves as a useful part of society) or otherwise make oneself miserable. Being the kind of gangster Kunio and his friends see themselves as is not manly in the way it once was. Dance isn't either, but there's joy in it if not money or glory, and that's got more value than posturing like a gangster.

The movie fizzles a bit at times, Nakamoto may show violence as ultimately ineffective and obsolete, but he can't quite create the triumphant dance moment that the film needs at or near its climax. It's great fun to watch Fujii play against apparent type, though, enough for the best moments to carry the rest.


Unidentified Murder

☆ ☆ ☆ ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2026 in Cinema du Musée (Fantasia: Anime no Bento, DCP)

There's a fun bit at the end of Unidentified Murder where a newscaster is trying to recap what has come before and seems to feel that relating this idiocy is below her dignity, and she's kind of right, but the trick of the film is that, for all we the audience knows what was going on is screwy, it's not quite something that can be dismissed until the movie has finished walking right up to the line.

25 years ago, three kids went out to play and only two came back, saying their friend had been abducted by a UFO. 25 years ago Mark (Ling Man-Lung) and Kit (Ronald Lam) are going on some internet UFO programs to talk about how their friend Ho vanished, laughing dismissively at a host (Kenny Wong) bringing up how it was rumored they killed him. Mark's girlfriend Lau Man (Renci Yeung), who does YouTube pranks on Mark regularly, decides to hire an actor, Kim Chi-Fei, (Peter Chan) to pretend to be Ho and meet them at the site of the disappearance on the 25th anniversary, but, uh, why did Mark and Kit bring shovels - were they going to dig something up?

Suffice it to say, the film has a few more chances to bounce back in time to show what was really going on, adding more layers to its deceptions as it goes. The key, though, is that while Kim is in the middle of all this an explicitly hired to fake something, he is absolutely the most open and earnest character in the group, trying to come up with motivations for his character with three lines as he invested himself completely into something that Man has apparently put about seven seconds of thought into. He's a simple character but never really dumb; Peter Chan does an exceptional job of giving this oddball the right human frustrations.

The whole cast is like that, and it's impressive how, even as the film gleefully reveals how the audience doesn't have the whole story and things aren't as they seem, nobody in the cast has to completely switch things up and say that you were lied to. These folks are, by and large, pretty simple young folks and content creators who haven't grown into something more substantial, but even Renci Yeung's shallow YouTuber makes sense as a person and garners affection beyond not deserving to be murdered.

By the time it's finished, the screenplay has piled a lot of "here's something I didn't tell you before but which changes everything!" on, with some chips investigating the scene besides, but it remains clear and surprisingly linear, dishing out the new information at just the right time to not have to do a lot of sleight-of-hand to keep things out of the audience's sight. The chases and reveals go quick enough to keep things moving without there ever being much risk of missing anything, whether joke or information.

Filmmakers Kwok Ka-Hei and Jack Lee Chun-Kit have a good handle on how to thrive at this scale; the film sort of feels knowingly small, with roughly three or four locations, and doesn't try to trick the audience into it feeling bigger. The movie seems to speak the language of both classic farce and modern media-savvy internet video well, and gets good laughs from each of its about faces.

While You Can: Scarlet and Dust Bunny

I'm a bad "the guy you know who sees everything and recommends the good stuff online" these days, but it's especially acute with these two movies that I quite liked and which I knew were going to be short-timers. They're fun and deserve the biggest screens you can see them on, and they've got maybe a day or so of that left, as both seem to have got these releases to fill screens before the blockbusters arrive on the 19th.

Scarlet might be back on Imax screens come 6 February, depending where you live; none of the other things being released that day seem likely to bump Send Help and, at least in the Boston area, big anime releases tend to get the big screen, and this release may give Sony Pictures Classics more reason to open it wide: The 12-18 November run is an Oscar qualifying release, but while LA and NYC have traditionally been enough for that, this getting Imax screens in ten cities. There doesn't seem to be an animated feature shortlist, but of the 35 qualified features there are six big-studio ones (The Bad Guys 2, Dog Man, Elio, KPop Demon Hunters, Zootopia 2), two big animes (Chainsaw Man, Demon Slayer), and a few wild cards (this, Arco, Fixed, The Legend of Hei 2, Night of the Zoopocalypse). I don't know how many Academy members/voters there are in the Boston area, or the other places it's released, but it could be the difference between being 6th in the voting and 5th, and thus being able to be advertised as an Academy Award Nominee when it gets its regular release.

I must admit, the idea that Sony has rented out the biggest screen at Assembly Row for a week on the off chance that Frederick Wiseman decides to watch some anime tickles me. It should be there tomorrow (Wednesday), then bumped to a regular laser screen on Thursday, then so long for a month and a half.

Dust Bunny, on the other hand, is more a "grab some screens during a window between big weekends and hope you get lucky" play. It's got a 2024 copyright date on the end, so it's possible Lionsgate/Roadside Attractions weren't really sure what to do with it for a year or so, and I kind of get that. It's a weird one that probably mostly appeals to folks who know who writer/director Bryan Fuller is, and maybe folks figure that television/streaming is its natural home because that's where he's done almost all of his work. It'll look really cramped there, though - it's got a super-wide 3.00:1 aspect ratio and a lot of detail - and I'd kind of love to see if it would hit with a bigger crowd, or a different one. It was kind of hardcore nerds.

It's playing Boston Common & the Seaport on Wednesday, just matinees at the Common on Thursday, and after that, you have to head to the Liberty Tree Mall in Danvers, where it's holding spots until the Christmas releases.

I wonder how both will play with younger viewers, too - Scarlet is PG-13 and Dust Bunny is R, both for violence, and I kind of wonder if that would be reversed if Scarlet used guns and Dust Bunny used knives. They both feel like things that could drop tween/teen jaws.


Hateshinaki Sukâretto (Scarlet)

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 12 December 2025 in AMC Assembly Row #1 (limited release, Imax Laser)
Where to stream it (when available)

Scarlet may be writer/director Mamoru Hosoda's best since The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and it's not like the other films he's made since haven't been some of the best anime coming out of Japan. It's certainly his most ambitious. Those ambitions aren't subtle, but they're earnest, and he's willing to let them wind up a frayed mess by the finale where some might engineer a more pat resolution. Heck, it feels like he can see the audience watching for the moment when he cheats and dances around it.

Scarlet (voice of Mana Ashida) is a princess in 16th Century Denmark, beloved of the people and her father King Amleth (voice of Masachika Ichimura), a pacifist who favors negotiation with his neighbors rather than competition. But, well, something is rotten in the State of Denmark, and Amleth's brother Claudius (voice of Koji Yakusho) usurps the throne and marries Queen Gertrude (voice of Yuki Saito), and while Scarlet aims to take revenge, he strikes first, poisoning her. She wakes up in The Otherworld, a purgatorial afterlife out of time, and when she finds out Claudius is there as well, sets out to finally end his existence. What she doesn't count on is falling in with Hiriji (voice of Masaki Okada), a paramedic from 21st Century Tokyo, who is kind-hearted and even treats the foes Scarlet fights along the way to confront Claudius in his castle near the gate to the next world.

Along the way, Scarlet is a frequently-dazzling piece of animation that mixes its traditional and digital pieces in smart ways: The cel-shaded CGI Otherworld looks kind of uncanny while the hand-drawn Denmark feels real, but not jarringly so; the two styles are just similar enough that one might not necessarily clock a difference in style versus tone, especially during a later visit to what may be the living world. There are more action beats than Hosoda usually goes with, with swordfighting that's exciting enough for one to notice there's quality choreography, and a fantastic dragon that explains its purpose with action rather than any exposition. It's more intentionally multi-ethnic than anime often is - it feels noteworthy that many of the nomads Scarlet and Hiriji encounter are Middle Eastern, both fitting the desert environment and perhaps a reference to how many laborers in Japan are Kurdish and other MENA refugees - and merges its influences well.

The action is intense, but there's also a fair amount of fun amid the intensity, with the Hamlet references playful ("get thee to a monastery!") and a bit more fun for those of us who have seen Hamnet a week earlier. That's kind of important because Hosoda is putting Scarlet and Hiriji through the ringer for a purpose: Hiriji's quiet decency does not quite seem naive compared to Scarlet's grim desire for revenge - he's aware that he comes from a more peaceful era - but it's a constant, non-judgmental reminder that Scarlet has fallen from the girl who truly believed in her father's ideals, and regaining them is hard; she's seen too much and committed to doing too much. We've seen her shed the lovely princess gown and put on armor like she'd decided that was her true self, and her glimpse of Hiriji's world is both inspiring and the cause of some despair - how can there be a place like that when so many suffer?

It's that confusion that makes her final confrontation with Claudius raw and stressful - she's been both laid low by Claudius and Gertrude's betrayal and hurt as she has crossed a barren wasteland, but has also seen the good examples of Amleth and Hiriji, and how they have had an effect on those she would see as enemies. She wants to do the right thing, but knows that any kindness on her part will be met with violence and cruelty by Claudius. One can feel Hosoda trying to find a resolution to this that is both hopeful but honest, and doesn't use the circling dragon as a heavenly deus ex machina that says everything will be put right, and he mostly manages it. It's tricky and messy, but then, one shouldn't be completely reassured that things will work out.

Here's hoping that Sony's gambit to get this in front of some Academy voters so they can market this as an Oscar Nominee in February works; it's a worthy film that deserves the boost.


Dust Bunny

* * * (out of four)
Seen 13 December 2025 in Alamo Seaport #1 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime pre-order link)

Somewhere around the middle,Dust Bunny becomes rather a lot, piling more and more on but not necessarily paying things off to make room, writer/director Bryan Fuller maybe being a little too coy about the nature of his genre crossover and not quite having the time to service everything he's got in play without tipping his hand too much. But even when you can see the movie straining, Fuller is filling a Barry Sonnenfeld-shaped void at the movies that I hadn't quite realized was there, in a way that's very much his own. It's instantly recognizable for those who have seen his TV work, and makes you wonder why he hasn't done film before.

The story at least seems simple enough - eight-year-old Aurora (Sophie Sloan) is convinced there is a monster under her bed, and the disappearance of the parents who pooh-poohed the possibility doesn't exactly give the audience reason to suppose that the lint underneath coalescing into something is anything but what it looks like. A neighbor (Mads Mikkelsen) catches her attention, especially when she seems to see him slaying a dragon late at night in Chinatown. She offers him money to kill her monster, but the fact that she has seen his "monster-slaying" activities puts him in a bind, and the pair of them in danger.

That sequence with the neighbor and the dragon and everything around it is a delight, a merger of elaborate production design, whimsical choreography, and well-used visual effects that sets the stage for the film's heightened world and balances the different perspectives of Aurora and the unnamed neighbor without tipping its hand too much. It's full of movement that is fluid but also kind of unnatural. A thing one can't help but notice in this and other scenes at this end of the film is that Fuller doesn't have Mikkelsen or Sloan speak when their characters wouldn't, trusting their particular body language to say what needs to be said and allowing them to demonstrate and withhold in a way that feels natural. The action piece that balances the film on the other end is a different beast, chaotic and with a fair amount of talk to make things clear, but that's kind of right, in its way; the film is setting up and resolving mysteries through action, and each fits that purpose.

The rest of Dust Bunny, filled with contention between the central pair and those in their orbit, is an odd duck. It's the rare movie that gets an R rating for "some violence", and I wouldn't be surprised if the studio spent the last year trying to squeeze it into a PG-13 - I suspect it's the use of guns rather than fantasy weapons that keeps that from happening - and because it feels like the sort of thing that made tweens go for Tim Burton 40 years ago, an ornate darkness with corners to explore where every character worth the audience's affection has innocent and cynical sides in conflict (I'd have little trouble recommending it to my 14/15-year-old nieces). It can't quite square that circle, and you can kind of feel Fuller circling around something about violence being difficult to escape once it's unleashed or monsters inside everyone but not quite landing, seemingly struggling to turn his script into a story that does more than look cool and make you grin at its eccentricity.

That eccentricity is a ball, though, with the visual team going full-on maximal in the extremely wide screen frame - it is very much from the imagination of the creator of Pushing Daisies and Wonderfalls - and the combination of puppetry and digital animation for the titular monster is nifty: It must, at various times be unnerving both believable and unbelievable in turn, and mostly manages that. One can feel Mads Mikkelsen getting into a groove as the movie goes on, his weathered cool a perfect sort of contrast with Sophie Sloan's cherubic agitation. David Dastmalchian shows up to steal a bunch of scenes in the end, and Sheila Atim does fairly nice work as someone who is often a catalyst but seems real enough that she's not just there to make things happen. Sigourney Weaver gets a tough draw, her shadowy but stylish operator is threatening but not quite charismatic.

It's a mess, but the visuals and performances and fun soundtrack tend to be elaborate and charming without ever losing track of how it's a kid's scary story set in a John Wick-like world. I had a blast with it, even when it was treading water; it's all the colorful fantasy invention of a Fuller TV show compacted down to about 100 minutes, and I hope Fuller gets to do more like it on the big screen.

Fantasia 2025.05: International Science-Fiction Short Film Showcase, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

Unusually short day, but a long post because it started with a shorts package. Well, didn't exactly start with it; I spent the first slot back in the apartment, finishing a post covering Friday, because the two things on offer were Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, which would run again the next day, and Bullet in the Head, which I've watched a couple times in the last couple years and believe has already been announced as the group of Hong Kong classics from the Golden Princess collection that Shout! Factory will be touring soon. You're welcome!

Between being the last one in and sitting where I can escape in a hurry if need be, it wasn't a great spot for pictures, especially if you use the phone's panorama setting:

Let's split that up a bit.

So off at the very far left, we have the event's host, then "Filther" filmmaker Simen Nyland, from Norway; "Lola" director Grace Hanna & executive producer Derek Manansala, from the US; "Weird to be Human" director Jan Grabowski, art director Agnieszka Adamska, and production designer Juliusz Dabrowski, from Poland; and "Disappeared" director Jeong Eun-uk, from South Korea.

Jeong's interpreter was next, then finally representing "Fingerprints of the Gods" were writer/director Wei Zhenfeng, producer Zhong Yu, and one more member of the crew, with their interpreter hiding behind.

I believe my favorite bit of the Q&A was Grabowski being asked about creating the look for their synthezoid character and handing the mike to Adamska after saying a few words, where she said she had about $2,000 for the whole thing and then they had to use most of it on a skullcap because the actress wouldn't shave her head and so that made things harder than they needed to be.

After that, it was a decision between a restored Shaw Brothers film at 5:40 and something maybe sci-fi-ish at 6:30, and I chose the former even though I knew I'd probably be getting it on disc soon enough; the description of the other seemed a bit inside-baseball. It gave me a bit of time for the annual burger at Mr. Steer before heading across the street for Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark, which was one of the things I've had circled on the schedule since it was announced, having dug the original when it played the Brattle in its American release, kind of amazed there was a follow-up.

Then back to the apartment, with Cielo, Japanese Avant Garde Pioneers, Honeko Akabane's Bodyguards, and Dog of God on tap for Monday. It's Saturday now, and I'm planning on Hold the Fort, The Girl Who Stole Time, Influencers, and Haunted Mountains: The Yellow Taboo, with Funky Forest highly recommended.


"Moon & Back"
* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Writer/director Pony Nicole Herauf knows that the science-fictional aspects of her short film don't make a lot of sense, and bakes it into the beginning, when Branch (Bren Eastcott) and Mattie (Mattie Driscoll) phone a radio call-in show and are yelled at on-air for saying that the issue in their relationship is that their close friendship struggled when Branch was away at college, and now her new job is going to take her to the moon. It's going to be a big thing soon, they say.

Is it? Well, there's not exactly a lot else in the story to suggest it, but also only the most occasional slip to suggest that Branch is sick and may either be dying soon or undergoing experimental treatment far away, and this is a last weekend where that euphemism will be strictly enforced. It's not a thing one sees in the very funny performances from Eastcott & Driscoll at first - Branch & Mattie are the sort of delightfully ordinary folks who are funny in large part because of how they come off as mainly being funny to each other, even with Herauf giving them a lot of good lines - but they're good enough to give a lot of heft to scenes played against somewhat lo-fi visual effects toward the end.


"Lola"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I'm inclined to believe that "Lola" depicts what's actually going on, with teenage prodigy Tessie (Jovie Leigh) making yet another attempt to cure or at least arrest her grandmother's fast-moving dementia. It's got the feeling of someone who has always been superlatively bright running hard into her limitations and kind of doesn't work unless Tessie can actually get in there and receive one last bit of good advice from the part of Lola's brain that hasn't been scrambled.

Of course, what's fun is that the apparent limitations of a student film lead to director Grace Hanna making a lot of choices that emphasize that this is from the point of view of a precocious child, from the animation to the props made of everyday objects to a mindscape that's got the same general form of one where filmmakers spend millions of dollars to create a mental library but is all the more poignant for its relative simplicity. The costume Leigh is given to wear as Tessie is also adorable whether it's the characters existing in a heightened world, her sort of playing dress-up, or somewhere in between.


"First Sight"

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"First Sight" looks like it's going to be a "don't fall in love with an AI construct" thing, but writer/director Andew McGee has some more interesting things to do, as widow Luna (Ellise Chappell) is matched for a first-date with handsome, likable Antony (Jacob Fortune-Lloyd). As a writer who reviews new consumer technology, she's got top-of-the-line Bluetooth contact lenses with a powerful AI in her phone offering useful advice on the heads-up display, but taking its recommendations doesn't make for an exciting date, and that's before the ransomware attacks.

I've been wondering when we were going to start to get more stories of artificial intelligence being kind of useless in situations where human expression is concerned, as features continue to come out with androids who are more human that human or AIs that can outwit even the most clever protagonist, and that's pretty far from the experience of anyone who has desperately tried to shut Copilot off. McGee is smart about this without it coming off as a lecture, and the ransomware bit is clever (although I'm almost more frightened of a hack where my reading glasses replace the fine print on a contract), although it kind of stretches the blind date out in a way that seems untenable.

Ellise Chappell is pretty darn good through that, at least, and all-around; she captures the bits of McGee's script that require her to be sad in a big way, even if it's not always on her face, and the sort of generally nervous that makes these sort of shortcuts so tempting. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd hits the right tone as well, disappointed enough that Luna is taking outside cues enough for it to show without seeming mean or sanctimonious enough to be unappealing.


"Disappeared"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

"Disappeared" kind of feels a little more like The Matrix with the serial numbers scraped off than one would maybe like, although with interesting ways to go should Eunuk Jeong get a chance to expand it. There are times when I wondered a bit if it were written and selected with the intent of showing off the studio in which it was shot in a sort of symbiotic way, a chance for both the business and the filmmaker to have a polished calling card, and that determined a lot of its emphasis.

I do kind of like the central performance by Tan Woo-seok, whose character seems to be the sort of screw-up where both he and those who know him get frustrated at how his limitations get in the way of his being generally likable - one sort of feels bad for noting how annoying it must be - and he's got a bit more range than that when need be.


"No Nation"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Between this and 40 Acres, I'm liking the greater Native/First Nations representation showing up in some recent post-apocalyptic tales. Not necessarily a whole lot, but enough to make one consider how some things would shake out. "No Nation" carves out a nifty little niche where it feels grounded and gritty while hinging on silly genre nonsense, and director/co-writer Jeffrey Elmont seems to know it, having characters ask why they're doing the elaborate rugby ritual rather than something more sensible.

The reason, of course, is that the rugby ritual is cool, which is both why we watch these movies and how the guy in charge exerts control. The audience feels the excitement of it even if they don't necessarily have a rooting interest; Elmont and company reveal details as the combatants play rather than do an explanation ahead of time, throwing a monkey wrench into it just as the viewers understand. At that point, there's no satisfaction in anyone being hoisted by their own petard, and part of what makes the finale feel honest is that there's a lesson there but one maybe can't be sure people will take the right one to heart.

"Weird to Be Human"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Sometimes, watching science fiction, I'll groan at "back in the bad old days of the Twentieth Century, we did this, and though we say we've outgrown it…" dialogue, even if delivered with intense earnestness by William Shatner or Patrick Stewart, but I feel like I'd kind of welcome it in "Weird to Be Human". Part of that is that we're in "AI is more human than human" territory, a bit strained as AI makes things in everyday life dumber, and part is because many folks in the present who could do with a fable about how the government chooses who is eligible for citizenship and makes them jump through tortuous hoops to obtain it are isolated from the process and could maybe use the linkages.

All that is in "Weird to Be Human", but you may have to know it's there to see it. Happily, it's got a nicely unsettling "one dystopian room to decorate in budget Cronenberg fashion" aesthetic, the sort of performances where a viewer can settle in and change their impression of who is supposed to be the audience surrogate and who is supposed to be the monster over the film's running time, and just enough memory of being behind the Iron Curtain and having resurgent right-wing movements for everyone involved to know of what they speak. The small cast handles their parts quite nicely, willing to sound alien and odd but let their inner humanity come through, for better or worse.


"Fingerprints of the Gods"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

I wonder, a bit, to what extent a character named "Monkey" was intended to make one think of some sort of trickster deity at first, even though we're probably more in "at a typewriter" territory in this short, as a reporter is given a story that makes him question the foundations of the universe.

"Fingerprints" is nice-looking - I particularly liked the precise layout of Monkey's apartment inside a run-down building - but it kind of falls prey to what hobbles a lot of simulation-theory stories, where there's not exactly much the folks discovering that they live inside a simulation that may be shut down can do about it, and for all that director Wei Zhenfeng talks about being inspired by the Mandelbrot Set, he never quite finds a way to blow audience minds with some sort of fractal revelation of simulations within simulations. It's a nicely-mounted short, but probably the one where specifics have faded most over the time it takes to write things up.


"Filther"

* * ½ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: International Sci-Fi Showcase, laser digital)

Appearing at this moment, with its faceless protagonist, steampunk imagery and compositing where the elements don't quite seem to match, this probably draws "is this made with generative AI?" more than the "nice ambition, but maybe you're stretching a little thin" it would have gotten a couple years ago. Unfair, perhaps - nothing in the credits indicates that's the case - but it's got the feel: Some nifty ideas, a focus on aesthetics, and a story that's relatively thin, trying to be capital-E Emotional while connecting the big visuals.

I found it kind of pretty but distancing, and there's something really odd about the love story seeming to favor the match-making service over the nice girl at the shop nearby who at least seems to like him. Nothing' is really happening other than the protagonist fixing things, and for as much as the clockwork construction is kind of a soothing respite from folks being mean to him and the general tumult among the normies, the movie isn't doing much more than showing pretty pictures to earn a happy ending.


Tian long ba bu (The Battle Wizard)

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Where to stream it(Prime link), or order the 2009 DVD at Amazon

The Battle Wizard may not be one of those Shaw Brothers flicks with a surprising seed of greatness in it, but it's awesome beyond its campiness, diving into one weird thing after another, barely considering the possibility of slowing down.

Twenty years ago, Qin Hongmian (Gam Lau) informed her lover Tuan Chengchun (Si Wai) that she was two months pregnant and telling her husband that it was his wasn't really an option, since he'd been away for six months, That husband (Shih Chung-Tien) chose an inopportune moment to return and attack Chengchun, only to discover that the latter's kung fu is so powerful he can shoot energy blasts from his fingers. Oh, and Chengchun is a prince who already has a fiancée (Hung Ling-Ling) who dismisses Hongmian in the bitchiest fashion possible. So it's no wonder that Hongmian spends her daughter's entire childhood teaching her kung fu so that Mu Wangqing ("Tanny" Tien Ni) can seek revenge on her father, his wife, and any offspring they may have produced. The trouble is, Chengchun's sun Tuan Yu (Danny Lee Sau-Yin) is a pacifistic scholar who has no desire to learn martial arts, which means he'd be in big trouble after stepping out to prove to his father that one just needs words if he didn't meet pretty snake handler Cheng Ling'er (Lin Chen-Chi), as Hongmian's husband has been hiding out, biding his time and training a disciple to assassinate Yu as well.

It's a lot happening and it's about an inch deep, sure, but like the best Shaw Brothers martial arts films, there is just enough earnestness in that inch to occasionally surprise, whether it's the look of shock as Hongmian realizes she's been abandoned or how enough friendship develops between Wangqing and Yu that the filmmakers aren't just teasing incest (amusingly and coincidentally, this special-effects-heavy film was made in part as a response to Star Wars, anticipating this twist by five and a half years). No matter how frantic and silly things get, the cast gets to make their roles more than ciphers notable for their fighting styles.

They're fighting a lot, of course, but there's a good balance to the violence that alternates between splatstick and good wire fu. The filmmakers go to town with all the visual effects and fantasy that mid-1970s Shaw Brothers can muster, complete with finger guns, rubber monsters, and a guy in a thoroughly unconvincing gorilla suit. The action choreographed by Tong Kai mixes up swordplay, punching and kicking, and what is effectively gunfighting fairly well, so that combatants aren't just posing at each other, and things get enjoyably gross as limbs get blasted off (leading to characters running around on iron chicken legs) or Lee Sau-Yin seems to have a good time playing Tuan Yu as surprised by the martial-arts moves he gets by drinking magic snake's blood.

It's got a nice pace to it, too, introducing a new absurdity just often enough to get audiences saying sure, why not, rather than feeling overloaded. It's maybe a bit too much by the end - there are points when I was thinking it's been too long since we checked in on the cute snake girl, and I suspect a subplot about where her family fits into all this was cut until the film needed more bodies for the ending battles - but it goes down smooth and never stops amusing for its whole 77 minutes.

And, honestly, what else do you want? The Battle Wizard is determined to entertain from start to finish, and it's a gas all the way through.


Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 20 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)
Where to stream Tamala 2010 (Prime link), or pre-order the disc at Amazon

Sometime asked if seeing the first movie made this 23-year-later sequel better and I had to say, maybe, although it's been 20 years and I really should have bought and watched the new disc as soon as this was announced a part of the festival, the way I often do when sequels drop after this sort of wait. This could go up or down, depending on how that plays for me when I see it again.

(You're already talking to the distributor, right, Ned?)

As it opens, one-year-old kitten Tamala is just hanging around the run-down, graffiti-covered Cat Tokyo, popping in to visit her boyfriend Michaelangelo, a private detective and handyman who has just been hired to find someone who vanished a couple weeks ago, on 7 July, and while it seems like Tamala wouldn't be much help, she knows people, and they soon find video footage of him vanishing into thin air - and not only that, the same thing happened to six other cats that same night, forming a pattern across Cat Japan that matches a constellation. Meanwhile, a one-eyed mercenary named Blur is tracking occult occurrences around Cat Earth, many of which seem to lead back to Tamala herself.

I don't know that vaguely remembered details of Tamala 2010 really helped - they basically had me expecting this to be kind of unnervingly sexy, which didn't seem to be much of a factor after the start - and I kind of think loose continuity is kind of explicit here. Tamala is described as a 1-year-old kitten despite this movie taking place 20 years later than the first. It is, perhaps, a sort of meta-commentary on the state of media, with corporate entities behind the scenes managing cycles of destruction and rebirth, with the Real End lurking. The punk, anti-capitalist characters of the first film reappear somewhat jarringly toward the end, though their message is somewhat muted.

There's a lot of movie to get through before that material really takes center stage, though, and the long middle is seldom nearly as fun as the apocalyptic finale or watching literal sex kitten Tamala (seemingly what you'd get if you gene-spliced Betty Boop and Hello Kitty) tags along on Michaelangelo's missing person case. Tamala herself is in short supply for a while, and none of the other characters who get more involved with the plot are as memorable or fun, with the story itself more atmosphere than developments that pull an audience closer.

Like the last one, though, it looks and sounds amazing, a run-down retro future with great character designs, touching camera, and nifty music and sound the baseline . The mostly B&W look hits the direct spot where manga, film noir, and the Fleischer Brothers overlap. Tamala's cheerful dancing and bouncy walk (accompanied by squeaky boings to make one wonder if she's wearing leather all the time) give way to unsettling violence, and while I suspect that much of the film was realized digitally, writer/director/composers "T.O.L." really lean into that in the final act with a robotic cat god whose obvious CGI nature makes her incursion into Cat Earth almost Lovecraftian.

So, yes, going to see this again, and looking forward to it. It's crazy stuff, probably about 40% nonsense even if you've recently caught up on all previous Tamala material, but fun and energetic nonsense.

Fantasia 2025.04: Anime no Bento, "The Story of the Three Sisters", The Devil's Bride, "Check Please", Blazing Fists, "Look Closer", and Good Boy

Busy Day!

Programmer Rupert Bottenberg was justly proud of having the anime shorts program all independent works by up-and-comers, which probably makes getting four of the six to Montreal - Yasuteru Ohno ("Mamiko's Poop"), Shuzuku ("Dreaming of a Whale"), Ryusei "Vab.png" Hasegawa ("Beyond the Trail"), and Kim Sung-jae ("Redman") - even more remarkable. It was a fun introduction, although one that kind of underlined for me just how odd doing an event like this in a foreign land must be: You stand there kind of stoically while folks are going on in another language, and then become very animated when given a chance to speak about your film. Must be a crazy thing to do so young. Still, they had fun with it, including Ohno challenging the whole auditorium to rock-paper-scissors for a copy of a compilation DVD containing all the final film projects for his school (which you may not be able to play in North American players because it's Region 2, although at least it's NTSC).

After that it was across the street for The Devil's Bide, which I'm going to need another run-through to really appreciate; hopefully it hits the Brattle in the fall ahead of its Blu-ray release.

Then back across the street for the rest of the night, with programmer Steven Lee (man, seems like he was just an intern yesterday!) introducing "Check Please" writer/director Shane Chung and director of photography Tristan Baumeister. It's one he pushed for, because apparently picking up the check is a Big Deal for a lot of Asian and Asian-American folks, especially Korean[-American]s, which I've seen referenced occasionally. They got a nice slot ahead of the new Takashi Miike film, Blazing Fists, which was cool.

Although, about Blazing Fists... So, I heard programmer King-Wei Chu mention that there was a miscommunication and a movie they believed to be an hour and twenty minutes (1:20), was actually two hours (2:00), and it was this one, which was going to have a domino effect on the rest of the evening's schedule. Not a really big deal - the next film would be the rest of the day, but it meant that by the time I got out of Blazing Fists, the press line for Good Boy was good and long, and I was in the last group of six to get in, meaning this was my view:

Not really complaining - I try to just be grateful the festival thinks this blog is worth a pass in these situations - although I was glad that this was a really quick short and feature because I didn't have a chance to prioritize an easy exit from my seat should my bladder act up.

Crazy the zoom the camera in one's phone has, huh? Here we've got actor Thompson Sewell, producer Mackie Jackson, and writer/director/DP Tyson Edwards of "Look Closer" (and programmer Mitch Davis on the side) talking about their nifty little short; I gather Jackson created the painting in the center, which they built the short around.

And here, Mitch welcomes director (and co-star) Ben Leonberg, who left the titular good boy Indy at home because this situation would probably freak a dog out and it's not like his dog knew he was starring in a movie anyway. As he put it, there's a good reason why most folks make movies with humans; this was apparently 400 shooting days over three years, with a mind-blowingly ratio of usable footage to what was shot. The set-up often took longer than shooting time because dogs don't actually have a great attention span.

It was, though an interesting shoot to describe, with Leonberg acting in the film just because he's Indy's human and the one he'll respond to, although his face was often out of frame or occulted so that a real actor could dub his lines. The sound guys, he said, were heroes, because almost every shot had Leonberg and his wife talking over it to coax Indy around, so the whole thing had to be re-recorded. And while there wasn't any digital work done on Indy, they created a shattering window when he jumped through an empty frame, composited a shot where Indy follows a ghost dog up some stairs together because Indy and the other dog were buddies and would have just played together if they weren't shot separately, and used a fake dog (mostly used for lighting setups) to jump off a roof with Indy coming out from behind the bush.

Just an absolutely crazy project, and it's kind of amazing how good it came out. I don't know if it will get a wide release - it's genuinely eccentric - but given that the audience was giving it the same reaction as a I remember a preview audience giving Flow, I suspect there's a lot of folks out there who will go for it.

Anyway, long Saturday ; Sunday was more spread out with the sci-fi shorts, The Battle Wizard, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark. Since I'm up to posts running two days behind, my plans for Tuesday are Stinker, Sweetness, the "Perilous Ports" program, Peau à Peau, and Contact Lens, with Fucktoys (seen at BUFF) a good time.


"Loca!"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Maybe not the single most cheerful post-apocalyptic movie you've ever seen, "Loca!" nevertheless has its two little kids who may be the last people on earth full of energy as they explore rural Japan, where the plant life has started to overrun the cities, although there's apparently enough pre-packaged food to eat and there's somehow still power where there needs to be. They're surprised when the train they find starts to move after they press the Big Red Button, but writer Takeru Kojima and directors Ion Miyamoto & Yuta Uchiya do not show any particular worry about the future or burdens of loss for them; the closest they come is mentioning that the people from before must have been really clever.

Which is sometimes disconcerting, maybe making this a brightly-colored horror story for the adults in the audience. But there's also something kind of joyous about it as one watches these two explore, learn, help each other out and start to build. The style is made to sort of evoke crayon drawings even though the actual ones that the kids are making in a notebooks are a different thing, a bright and colorful world that hasn't been specifically nailed down and is full of adventure, with the voice acting bouncing back to excited shouting quickly after every time it starts to get a little down.


"Dreaming of a Whale"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Seeing the two in sequence, one almost wonders if the girl wandering an empty Japan in "Dreaming of a Whale" with her dog Joanne is one of the kids from "Loca!" five years later or so, but it's a different vibe, as she is seeking something out and less protected from danger as she falls into a derelict (but unusable) train car of her own. She's frustrated by cryptic messages coming through on her radio, but still hoping to find another human being.

It's a more traditional anime style than the previous short, but director Shuzuku makes a nice-looking film and the voice acting from Myu as the girl and Sumito Owara as the voice at the other end of the radio are very nice. Shuzuku uses enough of the eight-minute running time to give her journey heft and suggest something larger, but also builds up to a climactic revelation that is simultaneously horrible and also something one appreciates for its cleverness, and which gives her a new path forward.


"Mamiko's Poop"

* * * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

Ten out of ten, no notes. "Mamiko's Poop" - the end result of a schoolgirl eating her feelings after seeing her crush with another girl - packs as many outright guffaws into its two-minute runtime as movies fifty times longer. It feels like a manga where the art style suggests someone drawing in a caffeinated fever for its crazy designs and accelerating pace, and somehow has time to ramp up from sadness to binging to "ewww" to hilarious violence.

Director Yaasuteru Ohno did this for school, and who knows what he'll learn in professional apprenticeship by the time he gets a chance to make something bigger, but it should be a ton of fun.


"Dungeons & Television"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

I don't know if I'd necessarily watch a "Dungeons & Television" anime series or read it as a manga - I can actually see myself chuckling at the high concept but not wanting to commit to a long-term series the way I do when I come upon Delicious in Dungeon in previews, but as someone whose idea of stringing telegraph lines across a kingdom always got shot down when playing Dungeons & Dragons as a kid, I appreciate the idea. This could be fun.

How fun? That's kind of tough to tell. Writer/director Junchukan Bonta seems to have the basics down for his six-minute short, in that the designs are just nifty enough to make one believe in the possible invention of television five hundred years or so ago, the adventuring party looks decent, and there are a few very solid gags in there, it's also moving way too fast for a viewer to really get attached and involved, seemingly just showing the highlights and almost having no time to tease effectively.

Heck of a calling card to show producers as a pitch, though.


"Redman"

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

This is definitely a case where I feel like I might like it a lot more if I was a bit more familiar with the context. I kind of get the idea of a tokusatsu hero trying to live a normal life (though is he depicted with his helmet because he's wearing it and everyone thinks it's normal or because this is his self-image?), wanting to stay away or get involved as something mysterious is going on with his old teammates, and I dig the noirish style of it. But I do wonder if greater knowledge of the sort of story it's either sending up or grittifying (to coin a word) would allow me to see general patterns or fill in the blanks because I knew what references it was built out of.

As it is, it's tantalizing and the craftsmanship is darn good, but I'm not up on the shorthand.


"Beyond the Trail"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Anime no Bento, laser digital)

A nifty little anime that could probably handle expansion to a feature, with two junior members of a team that is helping to clear away biological weapons left behind after a devastating war admiring a legend in their unit, although she holds some dark secrets. It's a mash-up of familiar sci-fi anime bits - people transforming into monsters, cool vehicles, the source of power being related to the monsters and slowly killing the heroine, mysterious foes whose interests are actually aligned - but they're familiar because they often work. The designs that the filmmakers have come up with are pretty cool, and there's a potentially pretty nice emotional core with the hero-worship Leichte has for Esus maybe not an entirely healthy complement to Esus having lost a daughter.

There is some difficulty balancing all this at 30 minutes, though - Leichte & Esus is probably the thing you want to focus on, but it leaves all the lore they're supposed to clean up feeling more like Macguffins rather than something that shaped them, and getting cut off because the story can only go so far in any direction. It also means Leichte's partner Gros winds up disappearing for a bit when their pairing is a lot of what's fun about the movie in its early portion. Just no room to work and I don't fault the filmmakers for prioritizing pretty aggressively on an independent, crowd-funded production like this, and I hope they get to do more.


"The Story of Three Sisters (or How the World Came to Have Four Seasons Instead of One)"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser DCP)

A charming little storybook feature that has seven directors for its seven minutes, but doesn't necessarily impose a strict separation on them, even as one sees the style of its mythic tale of how three goddesses of the sky, time, and life found their static world collapsing into constant change as one found her curiosity getting the better of her. The rapidly changing style feels like the origin of a myth, taking new shapes in the telling.

The thing I kind of dig after thinking about it, though, is how well these three concepts map to certain human family dynamics: Ida, the sky, is the responsible elder sibling, very fixed in her ways and seeing safeguarding her sisters as her responsibility; Tia, the tiny youngest sibling, is the baby who is more or less allowed to run amok and get into trouble; May, the middle child, is dissatisfied, chafing at her older sister's authority and envying Tia's freedom even as she loves her. This strict alignment must eventually fall, scary as that is, for the three to not resent each other and work together, because a family is not strict assignment of roles.

Neat.


Velnio nuotaka (The Devil's Bride)

N/A (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Fantasia Retro, laser DCP)
Pre-order the disc at Amazon

I am very much hoping this one comes around to the Boston area at some point, because to be completely honest, I think that I zonked out for about ten minutes in the middle or missed a subtitle indicating a time jump and just absolutely, completely lost the plot. It was like I was suddenly watching a different movie with most of the same cast and locations, also an opera, but I had no idea how the start and end were connected.

I do want to see it again, though, because where it's great, it's really great. The manic, probably sacreligious opening scene is reason enough to catch a pretty short movie, there's plenty of wit to be found around afterward, and the music - have we mentioned that this story of an angel who falls to earth and is immediately enslaved by a miller and caught up in various strange romances is a rock opera - is pretty darn good. I suspect that my biggest issue might be that the style of the music doesn't vary much from start to finish, which is how you get into a sort of reverie and eventually look up to wonder what's going on.


"Check Please"

* * * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Pretty dang simple when it comes down to it, as two co-workers out for dinner in New York - one a Korean ex-pat, one a Korean-American born and raised in the city - both try to pick up the check, only for things to escalate quickly into slapstick martial arts.

The action is pretty darn good - it's smartly staged so that one admires the athleticism and choreography, and winces occasionally at how that would hurt, but kind of stops short of feeling violent or dangerous; we're kind of having fun here and sort of representing things as larger-than-life so one can see the intensity of the feeling more clearly. I like that, ultimately, it ends on a sort of feeling of desperation to cling to this as part of their identity as a Korean man, with Jay (Richard Yan) lamenting that his (presumably non-Korean) wife knows more K-pop lyrics than him and he has to use a dictionary when he calls his grandfather, while Su-bin (Jeong Sukwon) notes he had to uproot himself from his home to provide for his family. It's maybe a sneaky second layer that the cashier is a woman, staring at her phone while guys go at this again.

Mostly, though, it's good jokes and physical comedy with appealing participants.


Blue Fight: The Breaking Down of Young Blue Warriors (aka Blazing Fists)

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

Has it actually been a while since Takashi Miike delivered a movie about a bunch of juvenile delinquent fighting, or does it just seem that way? This one is maybe not quite a masterpiece of the genre; it feels a bit like the genre as seen through the eyes of comfortable, older filmmakers rather than something bursting with rebellion, anger, and energy. That happens to us all, I guess, and who knows, maybe Miike and company are acknowledging that with the 18-year-old in juvie clearly played by someone twice that age.

He's around when a new resident of a juvenile detention facility, Ryoma Akai (Kaname Yoshizawa) meets Ikuto Yagura (Danhi Kinoshita), who has been there for a year. They become fast friends and are inspired to take up mixed martial arts during a visit by a fighter and internet celebrity whose webseries "Breaking Down" combines confessional and fighting elements. It's not long before they are paroled, join a gym, and find work in a factory, though they've also got marks on their backs from a local gang consolidating their power and a crush on an influencer Ryoma knew from high school (whose ex is teetering on the brink of winding up a thug himself). Oh, and Ikuto was in juvie after being fingered for a crime he didn't commit (this time) and has vowed to take revenge on the person who did, not knowing it's Ryoma.

If this sort of movie is going to be comfort food now, Blazing Fists is at least enjoyable and amiable enough. The script is a bit on the wink-y side when it celebrates the power of friendship and happily walks through the genre tropes; though writer Shin Kibayashi is not adapting a fighting manga, he knows how the structure works but has the freedom to build it so that the expansive cast, regular fights, and sudden twists fit a movie rather than a serial. The cast is likable and each knows what they're there to do, not necessarily subtly (the scenes with the kids' mothers are fun, if kind of slight).

The movie also pleasantly recalls the V-cine aesthetic from when Miike started out with these films; things feel like they were shot quickly and allowed to be a bit flat or low-res (though today's low-res would have been top of the line thirty years ago). It's consciously not fancy, rather coming off of professionals getting the job done without a lot of fuss or pretension. It is, maybe, a love letter to the juvenile-delinquent movies that figured prominently in Miike's early career that doesn't treat them as more than they were.

Plus, the fighting is fun, eventually upgrading from earnest martial arts to the over the top brawls one expects from these movies. It's action that knows it's larger than life, where Miike and company enjoy throwing colorfully costume heroes against a horde, with as many jokes as battle cries thrown in. At the end, they're maybe looking to prove a point, both acknowledging the fakeness of these cinematic brawls but not giving a lot of credence to the stage-managed fights produced as mere web content either; even the main villain recognizes that the point of this is to fight like hell for the people you care about.

It's all right on the edge of self-parody, with the main characters' earnestness keeping it on the other side, but, then it's not like these movies are ever far from that, it's it?


"Look Closer"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

"Look Closer" is an impressively well-balanced horror comedy, making the audience feel just tingly enough to be uneasy but delivering solid dark laughs as an exhausted painter (Thompson Sewell) trying to power through to meet a deadline suddenly finds another work on his easel featuring a creepily distorted figure.

It's just on-the-nose enough to make one chuckle, as the painter seems to half-suspect that he's in some sort of nightmare, but niftily executed: Not only does one get the idea that the painting came first rather than just being a prop created to reflect the live-action make-up job, but there's a nifty effect of the painting seeming to throb with a heartbeat, alive in its own right. Filmmaker Tyson Edwards gives it all just enough time to breathe and make an impression and gets out before things have to make more than emotional dream-logic sense.


Good Boy

* * * ½ (out of four)
Seen 19 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Good Boy could easily be a movie that is remarkable for simply existing - getting even a very well-trained dog to do everything required to serve as a movie's protagonist is a daunting challenge - but this impressed beyond that. It walks a line between genre film and drama, getting viewers inside its canine hero Indy's head without necessarily anthropomorphizing him.

Something is wrong with Indy's human Todd (writer/direct Ben Leonberg dubbed by Shane Jensen), but he's not quite sure what; he's sleeping a lot and his sister Vera (Arielle Friedman) seems very worried. Soon after Indy stays with Vera a few days, Todd decides to uproot them from their Brooklyn apartment to the house upstate that Todd inherited from his grandfather (Larry Fessenden), but that seems even more wrong, and not just because Grandpa had a lot of dogs that didn't necessarily have long lives: Todd doesn't feel quite right, there are things in the corners that the human can't see, and a strange threatening presence in the dark.

What's perhaps most surprising about Good Boy is just how stylish the movie is. Some of it is perhaps a matter of necessity, where keeping the camera near Indy's eye level is necessarily going to create a different framing that everything else in the film must respond to. But the lighting is terrific, often a hellish red to highlight the dog's emotional turmoil, or kept low to emphasize how he and his human are out of their familiar crowded city. Humans often appear in backlit silhouette, eerie for human viewers, but a reminder that dogs don't read faces so much as body language, so those are the emotional cues we get without seeming to cheat to limit information.

And it works as a horror movie. The filmmakers seldom go for jokes about dogs finding vacuums scary, but seed something vague about what might be haunting this house before presenting it in a way a dog might experience it. The shadow game is strong, and the score highlights what's unnerving to Indy nicely. Some of the effects work, when it comes to that, may seem like it doesn't match the live action footage, but I like that somewhat, having given it a little thought. There's a wrongness to what Indy detects in a way that's not quite equivalent to human senses, and this gets that across.

Plus, Indy? Such a good boy! The best boy! We've been seeing more CGI dogs in movies lately, which is fine - it's not like animals can agree to participate or emote on demand - but they often seem too blank or too human, while Indy is all dog, with an expressive face and the right sort of whine. He's not really giving a performance, of course, but the editing is convincing and the raw material is charming.

I suspect the film may seem too experimental or gimmicky to some - even at 72 minutes, it's probably roughly at its limits - but the material is pretty universal and both the human and canine emotion feels genuine.

Fantasia 2025.03: "Sounds of Glass", The Bearded Girl, Nyaight of the Living Cats, and Find Your Friends

Check it out - North American guests!

Up first is Morgan Abele, who stood up quickly to introduce her short film "Sounds of Glass", playing before The Bearded Girl. It's pretty nifty! She didn't have a lot of time to tell stories about the shooting, but did mention that their location had apparently been a meat market before closing not long earlier, and shooting was interrupted a few times as people would see activity in the shop and walk in to try to buy steaks and the like.

Here, we meet The Bearded Girl director Jody Wilson, producer Amber Ripley, and cast members Anwen O'Driscoll & Harrison Browne. It was a fun conversation: O'Driscoll was apparently cast as the title character in part because there was riding involved and she grew up with horses, while Browne was very excited to explore what sort of masculinity his Masked Cowboy embodied. One other fun fact they mentioned was that Jessica Paré, who plays the title character's mother, was one of the last people cast because the film was set to be a Belgian co-production until just weeks before shooting and they'd maybe had ideas of Lady Andre being European, but once that fell through, the whole cast and crew had to be Canadian (and mostly from British Columbia) as part of their funding. I tend to think of Canada as having a deep talent pool, but apparently it was tricky to find women in it who are the right age and appearance that someone says "yeah, obviously Anwen O'Driscoll's mother" that are willing to have the make-up team give them a beard for the entire film.

(Tying into that, Wilson also mentioned that while she envisioned this as kind of taking place anywhere in North America, if anybody from Telefilm was in the audience, it was obviously set in Alberta. Canadian!)

After that, it was across the street for Takashi Miike-produced anime Nyaight of the Living Cats, which is kind of cute, but I think the best part was the introduction by "general director" Miike and actual director Tomohiro Kamitani sort of deadpanning around how this is a very silly show, and that maybe DIsney will call them ("like that'll happen"). It was kind of neat seeing Miike wearing regular glasses and relaxed, with salt-and-pepper hair, because when he came to Montreal to accept a lifetime achievement award, he was kind of funny, promising that he'd make enough new movies for them to give him another one in time, but he definitely had the sunglasses-indoors/black-hair-dye thing going.

Finally, programmer Carolyn Mauricette welcomes Find Your Friends director Izabel Pakzad, actor Jake Manley, and producer Allison Friedman. Pakzad's film was based on an incident that happened to her on her first visit to Joshua Tree, although in the film everything obviously goes much farther. They talked a bit about life imitating art during the shooting - there's a local-annoyed-with-kids-visiting-to-party character in the film played by Chris Bauer, and they would occasionally get interrupted by locals who were annoyed with the hubbub of a film shoot - and getting specific locations: Apparently one house they used is kind of famous, and getting to shoot in certain beautiful spots meant negotiations with both reluctant land-owners and the National Park Service.

Also, a lot of talk about prosthetics!

So that was Friday. Saturday would be the Anime no Bento 2025 program, The Devil's Bride, Blazing Fists, and Good Boy, although the end of the day got hairy. Sunday's plans are the sci-fi shorts, either The Battle Wizard or Terrestrial, and Tamala 2030: A Punk Cat in Dark.


"Sounds of Glass"

* * * (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

Morgan Abele's "Sounds of Glass" has a kind of nifty idea - a store that sells "soundscapes' in liquid form - with the key being that today it is minded by Enna (Zoe Wiesenthal), who is feeling depressed and not really comfortable with these sounds acting as memory triggers, until an an accident gives her a new perspective. It's a neat fantasy hook that nestles into a familiar world better than most, even if there is a bit of "has nobody done this before?" toward the end, and it makes the shop into a colorful, fantastical setting that's still grounded in the familiar.

Also, Wiesenthal has a great, expressive face, which is necessary for this sort of dialog-free story but not all it needs. Her expression dances between vaguely low, irritated, and wondrous, and she's also well-able to make the lack of dialogue feel more like people naturally not talking than pantomime (though her customers sometimes being awkward may be more on Abele's script working too hard rather than their performance). On the other side, Abele and company do nice work with the finale, smartly not leaning any further into synesthesia than they already are but letting the sound do the job.


The Bearded Girl

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Salle J.A. De Sève (Fantasia Festival: Septentrion Shadows, laser DCP)

You can't really miss what the filmmakers are doing here, but they do it in such amiable, low-key fashion that it comes off as just about as natural as the high concept can. Indeed, most of the time The Bearded Girl manages the trick of playing it straight without being too deadpan, which can be tougher than just making absurdist jokes.

Ten years ago, young Cleopatra felt the first bits of peach fuzz on her chin, which may sound alarming, but in the community of sideshow performers where she lives, bearded ladies like her mother Lady Andre (Jessica Paré) are sword-swallowers, magic users, and leaders, going back 80 generations. Now, Cleo (Anwen O'Driscoll) is about to be invested as leader, but the two have been constantly at odds, with Andre ignoring Cleo's desires to modernize the show and her arguments that her beardless sister Josephine (Skylar Radzion) is much more suited to the role. On the eve of the ritual, she snaps, shaves, and runs away from home, developing a major crush on Blaze (Keenan Tracey), who isn't particularly excited about being part of his family's business either. What she may not realize is that the deed to the family's land and theater transferred to her on her birthday, and if she doesn't claim it, a local businessman planning a casino resort (Robert Hakesley) will be able to scoop it up.

There are bits that maybe don't quite work for me; for a story about a frustrated kid who must find her own way, it could maybe give going full circle a slightly wider radius. The story is also such that nobody really has to do anything, which is sort of fine - it's got pleasant and eccentric enough characters to keep the audience entertained as they banter and interact in unusual ways shaped by the world they live in, but the film ends with a soft a landing as it can have. Did anyone actually accomplish anything, or really have to struggle to accept themselves and each other, or did they just get put in places where they couldn't do anything else?

It is enjoyable enough, though. Jessica Paré and Anwen O'Driscoll are especially good as the bearded mother and daughter, very much capturing the vibe where they've got clashing personalities and ways of expression but clash because they are very much alike underneath. It's a bit of a shame that the boyfriend played by Keenan Tracy is kind of bland, the sort of motorcycle-riding bad boy who you never see actually do anything bad but isn't far enough off center to feel like he could fit with Cleo's family and friends (it doesn't help that he's got to try and sell an exceptionally dumb thing to create a misunderstanding). He really can't compare to the oddball supporting characters back at the sideshow, whether they be Skylar Radzion's live-wire sister, Linden Porco's short-statured clown who probably holds everything together, or the various folks in the background.

The film does look pretty nifty, considering its makers are on a tight budget, with the beautiful vistas and stylized locations creating a nostalgic image of small-town North America where everyone took pride in their specialties, though the filmmakers are keenly aware of just how much these groups would come into conflict. There are times when I wondered if there was a draft of the screenplay that had a larger scale at some point, one where the sideshow seemed like some sort of viable business or the talk of magic and adventure was more than idle references not followed up on. That road can lead to pointless CGI that takes a viewer into the uncanny valley rather than the movie's world, but it's a bit of a tease here.

Still, the family dinner scenes feature lines about clowns being a viral part of the community, and the film is filled with other genuinely odd moments. Indeed, it's got enough charmingly screwy moments to fill a movie right up to the point where you go "huh, we're done?" instead of a grander finale.


Nyaito obu za Ribingu Kyatto (Nyaight of the Living Cat) Episodes 1-4

* * ¼ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival: Animation Plus, laser digital)
Where to stream it (when available) (Prime link)

It's not terribly surprising that Nyaight of the Living Cat reveals that there's not necessarily as much potential to its jokey premise as one might think fairly quickly, but it's still nevertheless disappointing in execution: It's the kind of self-parody that chooses to underline its gags rather than trusting in a deadpan commitment to the bit, and after four episodes, I can't say I'm particularly tempted to subscribe to Crunchyroll to see the rest.

Part of the trouble is that the series not only succumbs very quickly to "this stretched-out limited series could have been a good movie" syndrome, where the opening that throws the audience into its crazy world and teaches the audience what's going on quickly is followed by three and a half episodes that barely take it full-circle, never really creating a lot of suspense about how the characters get to their previous situation or surprising twists along the way. A large part of the rest is that the group by and large seem like anime tropes - the stoic/emotional modern samurai, the schoolgirls, the often-silly tough guy - rather than actual personalities. Indeed, all of them have a personality of "I really, really, really like cats, you guys", and that means there's not a lot of contrast between them in one situation or their reactions to different situations. It's a very one-joke show.

That one joke - there's a virus going around where people who touch a cat are turned into one, which kind of short-circuits a cat-lover's survival instinct in what's essentially a zombie movie situation - is pretty good, and the creators hammering it constantly results in them hitting one or two really good riffs for every ten "meh" ones and spread them out rather than using them all up at the top. The animation is decent (although the static backgrounds and the kinetic, computer-assisted action work against each other), and when things slip into absurd-horror mode, you see how clever this could be if the character work had clashing tones that worked nearly as well as the wordless bits do.


Find Your Friends

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 18 July 2025 in Auditorium des diplômés de la SGWU (Fantasia Festival, laser DCP)

Confession: Even when I was these characters' age, I probably would have hated the parts of the action that they were supposed to find fun, much less the rest of it; I was a boring kid. As a result, I spent much of the first half torn wishing they'd get to something interesting, or at least waiting for the promise of the title to kick in, not sure whether the film's target audience felt like they were killing time or getting invested for when things went pear-shaped.

That first half has five college seniors going to spring break and a big concert in Joshua Tree, California: Amber (Helena Howard), just out of a long-term relationship; Zosia (Zión Moreno), tall, friendly, and mostly nice; sporty tattooed Maddy (Sophia Ali); Lola (Chloe Cherry), a blonde who revels in her crassness; and Lavinia (Bella Thorne), the curvy ringleader who knows one of the musicians. During a stopover at a yacht party, Amber spots her ex and her spiral isn't helped when the guy flirting with her goes further than she wants once their alone together, and once at their rental, there's a hostile neighbor and the party leads her to both a musician and some locals who make her feel endangered.

I admit, acting like I didn't like the first half is unfair, because I did actually enjoy the film when it zoomed in on Helena Howard's Amber being more openly fragile than her brash friends and trying to keep up, while maybe realizing she's outgrowing them. Howard communicates her discomfort and how she's trying to ignore it well, without words much of the time, and it maybe hits even better for how much the film seemingly attempts to smother her with noise and strobes and her louder, crasser friends. Writer/director Izabel Pakzad builds things up well underneath the cacophony, building it so that the audience is very sympathetic to Amber even though one can't entirely say her friends are wrong when they later throw her own actions back in her face.

Granted, those friends are portrayed broadly enough that they're going to seem callous anyway, for better or worse. The other four actresses understand the assignment, and despite playing it big, they play it big in a way that feels natural for young people who have had enough privilege and good fortune to have so far partied hard and remained relatively unscathed. Pakzard does seem to run out of material for them, though - for all that a viewer will look at them all and say they know or knew that girl, Sophia Ali winds up playing "the other one" compared to Chloe Cherry's approaching trainwreck, Bella Thorne's rich bitch, and Zión Moreno's wide-eyed people-pleaser.

It takes a more overtly, physically-violent turn on the way to the end, even with some material off-screen and/or random to keep folks from enjoying someone who is just unpleasant rather than deserving monsters getting their comeuppance or whooping at gore effects. There's a terrific white-knuckle chase, though it's followed (after a weird jump-cut) by a sequence that feels a bit like it's there more to be gross and chaotic than anything that springs from what we've seen from the girls, even when the point is supposed to be the ones who project squeamishness have spines and vice versa. It's violent and visceral and seems like it should be satisfying, but doesn't feel right in a movie, especially since these guys are just anonymous marauders and it almost feels like this sort of violence can be meaningless in real life but not in a movie where there's been something to what we've seen otherwise.

That said, I know I've never been where this movie starts from and have to sort of analyze my way into something visceral. This movie just isn't for me, but for women half my age, which is a good thing; I'd rather see a dozen horror movies like Find Your Friends starting from what young women fear than slasher retreads built on nostalgic tropes.