Another World

The lesson Another World offers is that tenacity is a virtue, but only when your goal is attainable.

The film is a visual extravaganza worthy of the biggest screens, and it comes with a lot of breathless thrills. But wild, mind-boggling landscapes and white-knuckle fight sequences don’t quite counteract the sense that the movie’s big-swing message about hope is dwarfed by the agony it inflicts on its characters.

Another World may not check off all of your boxes, but it largely succeeds on its own terms.

Through intricate 2-D hand-drawn animation and its overall commitment to tonal abstraction, the film manages to make Gudo’s journey sing.

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.