Italian Premiere | In Competition | White Mulberry Award Candidate
Hong Kong, 2025, 111’, Cantonese
Directed by: Tommy Ng
Screenplay: Polly Yeung
Editing: Tommy Ng, Wong Fei-pang
Art Direction: Step C
Music: Adlian Chou, CMgroovy, Vicky Fung
Producers: Polly Yeung, Chan Gin-kai
Voice Cast: Chung Suet-ying (Gudo), Choi Hiu-tung (Yuri), Louis Cheung (Dark Sky), Kay Tse (Goddess), Yeung Nga-man (Goran), Will Or (Keung)
Date of First Release in Territory: November 1st, 2025
Hong Kong animators created a rare sensation in 2025, when fantasy epic
Another World seized imaginations and fuelled thinking on the division and rage spiralling around the globe. Based on Saijo Naka’s novel
Sennenki: Thousand-year Journey of an Oni, and directed by first-time feature helmer Tommy Ng with a script by producer Polly Yeung,
Another World flings viewers into a breathtaking journey across centuries. The time-shifting and world-switching setup can be complex, but the payoff is a timely tale of curiosity, salvation, and a belief that compassion can intervene before uncontrollable fury explodes.
At the centre is the small, cloaked and masked figure of Gudo (voiced by actress Chung Suet-ying). Gudo is a soul-keeper – a guide who escorts the newly deceased through a realm called Another World to get reincarnated. In this afterlife the dead shed their memories and have much of their souls washed away as little red strings before reincarnation. Almost all of those strings have knots on them, representing regrets and unresolved anger.
A new arrival in Another World is Yuri (Choi Hiu-tung), a girl who’s searching for her brother. Gudo is filled with wonder at her feelings, and he asks the zen-talking Goddess (Kay Tse) for permission to watch over Yuri for a millennium so she doesn’t become a Wrath. And what’s a Wrath? Unresolved resentments can accumulate into a seed of evil, and that stays hidden in the heart until it’s unleashed by rage and turns the person into a Wrath, a horrifying horned monster. Untying the knots back in Another World can at least reduce the damage caused by Wraths. Yuri, it turns out, is just one of several people we see Gudo assist in scenes jumping across human-world centuries. And joining him from Another World is the four-armed and headless swordsman Dark Sky (Louis Cheung, quite the chatterbox). He’s not just Gudo’s guardian but an expert killer of Wraths, usually putting them down with a good swing at the horns.
Ng packs plenty into his film, and speeds it along until the pieces fall into place. World building is impressive, with Ng having come up with his own visual concepts in absence of clear description in the source novel. The peaceful titular realm is rendered in rich pinks and blues echoing the weirdness of colour infrared photography, as well as psychedelic glowing flourishes across caverns and watery vistas. The mix of 2D and 3D animation has character design go its own way, flipping between soft pastel-filtered bodies and crisp, glassy shots revealing hidden seeds of evil. Gudo fascinates as a figure of low-key expression (choice mumbled line: “For some odd reason, I sense my heart shattering”) who comes to profound understanding of human nature. The Wraths have no fixed look, meaning each is an extravagantly styled beast like no other, and the fights against them send Hong Kong action choreography into hyperdrive. Buddhist concepts inform the story, sometimes meditatively, but Ng also depicts radical violence and cannibalism in his film’s darkest moments.
Production took seven years, before the film premiered at last year’s Annecy Animation Showcase in France. The Golden Horse Award for Best Animated Feature followed, and by year’s end it topped the 2025 Hong Kong box office. True to its title,
Another World transported audiences to whole new realms, and for Hong Kong cinema it demonstrated daring alternative paths to big-screen success.
Tommy Ng
Tommy Ng graduated from the School of Creative Media at the City University of Hong Kong in 2003 and has directed several award-winning animation shorts such as Tale of Rebellious Stone (2013), Another World (2019) and Everywhere (2022). In 2018 he founded the full-service cel animation company Point Five Creations, and beyond film he is also active in creative work for commercials and music videos. Ng directed animated sequences for the film Zombiology: Enjoy Yourself Tonight (2017), and in 2025 completed his first animated feature in Another World.
FILMOGRAPHY
2025 – Another World