There’s a moment early in Another World when the small demon Gudo — masked, witch-fingered, grinning with a face that cannot change expression — watches a dead girl named Yuri search for a brother she doesn’t yet know she can never find. He says nothing. He just watches. And somehow, in that silence, you feel the entire weight of what this film wants to be:
not a story about death, but about the residue death leaves behind.
Tommy Kai Chung Ng‘s debut feature, produced by Point Five Creations and SILVER MEDIA GROUP, is adapted from Naka Saijo’s novel Sennenki: Thousand-Year Journey of an Oni, and its premise is quietly devastating. In the liminal realm of Another World — a space between death and reincarnation — souls must untangle the knots of their unresolved resentment before they can be reborn. Leave enough knots, and a Seed of Evil takes root inside you, threatening to bloom into something monstrous. Gudo, a soul keeper who has never understood human emotion, agrees to help Yuri find her brother. What begins as a small errand stretches across a thousand years.
The visual world the film constructs is, without qualification, extraordinary. Point Five Creations evolves their award-winning 2019 short into something that feels genuinely unprecedented: scanned watercolor environments layered with 3D-rigged characters, achieving a calm, calligraphic stillness that most animation studios wouldn’t dare attempt. The palette — misty blues, bone whites, ember reds — carries a whole cultural vocabulary without announcing it. These are colors of incense, of mourning cloth, of rivers at dusk. The skeletal dance sequences and the waterfall of reincarnation don’t feel borrowed from Tibetan ritual so much as genuinely inhabited by it. This is not a film that wears Eastern aesthetics like a costume.
It’s also not a film that mistakes nihilism for philosophy, though some viewers have accused it of exactly that. To understand why that accusation misses the mark, it helps to see Another World not as a conventionally narrative-driven film, but as a visual-philosophical work — one that prioritizes the articulation of emotional and metaphysical states over linear storytelling. Another World does not offer a world where suffering is meaningless— it offers a world where suffering accumulates, where every unforgiven thing becomes weight, where the anger of one small girl can, across centuries of reincarnation, ripple outward into famine and war and collapse. That’s not nihilism. That’s karma taken seriously to the point of terror.
Gudo himself is the film’s quiet master stroke. He is not a savior. He doesn’t fix Yuri; he stays beside her across a thousand years of failed reincarnations, watching her become a resentful princess, a starving farmer, an orphaned child laborer in an industrial revolution factory — each life a new skin for the same unresolved wound. His role is closer to witness than rescuer, and the film is wise enough to know that witness is its own form of love. When he finally says, voiced by Chung Suet-ying with heartbreaking restraint, “I can feel my heart shattering” — you believe it precisely because he spent most of the film insisting he had no heart to speak of.
Where the film earns its more ambivalent reviews is in its structural confidence, or occasional lack thereof. The non-linear first half — cutting between Yuri’s death, Goran’s kingdom, Keung’s famine, without initially revealing that these are the same soul — asks a lot of its audience. The strategy is clearly intentional: the structure mirrors how memory and resentment actually work, fragmentary and recursive rather than chronological. But there’s a difference between a film that disorients purposefully and one that hasn’t yet built enough trust for the disorientation to feel earned. Another World dances along that line, sometimes gracefully, sometimes not. The connective tissue between storylines can feel thin, the dialogue occasionally more expository than it needs to be in a film this visually articulate.
The real tension at the center of this film, though, is one that no amount of screenplay polish could fully resolve — because it’s a tension built into the premise itself. Another World is asking its audience to sit with grief that doesn’t resolve neatly, with anger that has legitimate causes and still becomes catastrophic, with a world where being kind is framed as a choice even when the circumstances make kindness nearly impossible. Some viewers find this morally simplistic. I find it Buddhist in the truest sense: not comfortable, not easy, just honest about the cost of holding on.
The film is called Another World because it is, structurally and philosophically, committed to building a space that operates by different rules — not the rules of narrative causality we’re trained to expect, and not the rules of the mortal world where anger has simple, traceable origins. In that space, Gudo’s thousand-year vigil isn’t a plot device. It’s a posture. It’s what it looks like to stay.
By the time he reincarnates as a human baby at the end — losing every memory of Yuri, of Another World, of the millennium he spent watching over her — the film doesn’t present it as tragedy or triumph. It’s simply what happens when you’ve let go of everything you were holding. It lingers, the way the best funerary art lingers: not by demanding you feel a specific thing, but by making the feeling unavoidable.
Another World is not a flawless film. But it is a rare one. In an era when most animated features are quietly terrified of silence, it builds a world out of it.
Enjoyed This Story? Subscribe to EntertainLens for more entertainment insights.
