The wonder of Studio Ghibli meets the gruesomeness of Game of Thrones and the dark fury of a Greek tragedy in this striking and deeply strange animation from young Hong Kong film-maker Tommy Kai Chung Ng. His film is a gorgeous fairytale glutted with gut-wrenching moments of violence that make it strictly not suitable for kids. In one scene, a medieval feudal lord burns peasants alive in a grain store; in another, a teenage princess lashes the back of a general she blames for her father’s death to a bloody pulp.
It opens in a place called Another World, an afterlife stopover for humans who have died, on their way to reincarnation. In this netherworld we meet a troupe of adorable pint-sized spirits called soul keepers, whose job is to guide the dead to the next life. The dead leave their unresolved resentments behind in Another World; they become knots tied in beautiful threads of red silk. The place is run by Goddess Mira, who despairs that after millennia of untying knots she has failed to eradicate human hate and cruelty. It’s a world beautifully animated in a kaleidoscope of trippy pastels, with some breathtaking images.
One of the soul keepers, Gudo, is curious about human emotions, and the film tells the stories of the dead he helps. There is Yuri, a young girl who spends her time in Another World searching for her missing brother; and Princess Goran, mad with grief after the death of her father. Little Gudo dedicates himself to stopping a seed of evil planted in the heart of Princess Goran from sprouting, with devastating consequences for Earth and Another World.
The movie is about how people ruin everything with their destructiveness, but also about the beauty of the human heart. It’s so inventive and imaginative that I wanted to love it more, but in the end found it a little bit psychologically uninvolving, perhaps because of its nonstop swirl of ideas and stories.
