Gkids Films and Five Point Productions bring to you Naka Saijo’s 2012 novel Thousand Year Ghost to the big screen, Another World, a story about how life ending with regret can turn to death and destruction of oneself. This beautiful film takes you to the depths of one’s own harsh truths one is not willing to openly face. A story about past lives repeating a cycle of pain and anguish, if not for the actions of one small boy trying his best to help a friend recover her mind and spirit, or leave it to be destroyed by self-annihilating. Director Tommy Ng Kai Chung (Tales of Rebellious Stone 2013, Modin 2013, Cakra Buana 2015) pulls out all the stops to show you just how far someone will go to save another from themselves.
There and Back Again
Gudo is a soul keeper whose task is to ferry the souls back into the living by passing through the waterfall of reincarnation. If a soul has too many knots of unresolved resentment on them, they need to be extinguished by Dark Sky to prevent the creation of a Wrath. However, Gudo devised a plan to get Yuri to overcome her resentment rather than to lose her. Each iteration of her reincarnated soul has had more knots added, and with more knots came more chances of a wrath spawning, more powerful than the last opportunity if left unchecked. Gudo had the power to send a person to a moment in time to witness what angered them so much in the first place, hoping that if they saw a truth they didn’t see before, they would hold on to their anger, thus preventing a wrath, but every time he did that, it only made the situation worse.
The Search for an Unwanted Truth
Yuri was a soul that had been reincarnated for over a thousand years, and her red rope was reincarnated with more knots of unresolved resentment. If there end up being too many knots on one soul, it grows a seed of evil and thus turns into a Wrath, which is what was happening to Yuri, and why Gudo tried so hard to save her by making her remember how it all started and why she couldn’t find her brother. She lived in a village up in a mountain, she was starving and ate her brother. She became overwhelmed with anger; she turned into the wrath and killed her entire village. When she died, her mind regressed to a childlike state, someone who had witnessed so much trauma their mind would revert back to a time of carefree innocence. That regression caused her to forget what happened and when she entered the afterlife, she began her search for her brother.
Forced to Relive the Past
With every past life of Yuri thereafter came more moments of unresolved resentment. Princess Goran of Flower City wouldn’t accept her uncle had been accused of assassinating her father, the king, but also wouldn’t accept the fact that her father had committed suicide. After the fall of Flower City came Wheat Village. Keung, a wheat farmer from the village, was subjugated by the Nyer empire. He left the village to speak with a wrath god up in a temple in the mountains in order to turn himself into a wrath to scare away the soldiers. Lastly came Ying, an orphaned girl working in a factory during the Industrial Era.
Her friends Hardy and Nana were protecting her from a bunch of bullies on the second floor of the factory when Nana was forced off a railing and to her death. It enraged Ying to the point that she transformed into a Wrath and destroyed the factory. Yuri’s soul had been reincarnated for the last thousand years with these key moments of rebirth that herald the same cycle of anger and resentment that caused the seed of evil to grow closer to the birthing of the wrath.
For My Lord, I Stay My Blade
The misconception of the character Dark Sky is that he resembles the characteristics of the Angel of Death, the one who takes the souls of those who are at the moment of their death. Dark Sky’s purpose is to protect both the Human World and the Another World from the Wraths that spawn from the seeds of evil. The only time he does take a human life is when they’re at the brink of becoming a Wrath, which is why he was so furious with Gudo at times for preventing him from doing his job. He becomes very arrogant and has a belligerent attitude when being forced to stay his hand. As important as his character may be as a short-term solution to the Wraths, Gudo wanted to try a different method, one that doesn’t involve killing the host of the seed.
“If Hayao Miyazaki made Spirited Away in China”
Another World was first released in June at the 2025 Annecy International Animation Film Festival, then in October in Hong Kong. With an estimated $30-50 million budget, it made $15 million its first day at the box office in Hong Kong. So far, the film is only available in Cantonese with multilingual subtitles. It can be viewed for a limited run in both AMC and Fandango theaters, and streamed through Amazon Prime Video.
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