Fantasia Reveals 'Mononoke The Movie' World Premiere and More

Festival season is in full swing, with Cannes behind us and Annecy just around the corner. Looking a little further ahead to later this summer Fantasia is a genre festival with a dedicated animation strand. Ahead of the announcement of the full line up on July 3, the festival has announced its second wave of 2024 titles, including titles for the Animation Plus strand.

Based on the TV series of the same name Mononoke The Movie: The Phantom In The Rain will have its world premiere at Fantasia. The series features intricate palace intrigue and hallucinatory supernatural visuals, and the movie brings them to the big screen. Described by Fantasia as "visually exquisite to an almost overwhelming degree", it combines the aesthetic and imagary of edo-era Japan with pop art panache to create something unlike anything you've seen before (unless you've already seen the TV series).

Mantra Warrior: The Legend of The Eight Moons is inspired by the ancient Hindu text The Ramayana. Hailing from Thailand, director Veerapatra Jinanavin and his team at Bangkok-based Riff Studio have rebooted the mythology as a cyberpunk space opera. Mantra Warrior is intended to be the first part of a franchise and launch Thailand as a country that can produce world-class animation with global appeal.

Animalia Parodoxa is a mixed media feature that combines live-action with stop-motion animation and various other techniques. Combining genre film with arthouse cinema, it follows an amphibious humanoid searching for water in a labyrinthine, post-apocalyptic landscape. The film is presnted by the festival's Underground strand, in association with Animation Plus.

The Missing is a digitally rotoscoped Fillipino feature about Eric, a young animator who apparently has no mouth and is haunted by memories of an apparent alien abductions. It's descibed as a "a queer, surreal hybrid of romance, drama, and sci-fi." The third feature from director Carl Joseph Papa.

The festival has a rich tradition of screening animation from around the world. This year, they will screen under the 'Animation Plus' program. All films screening in this strand are eligible to compete for the Satoshi Kon Award for Best Animation.

This year's Fantasia Festival will take place From July 18- August 4 in Montreal, Canada. More information can be found out about the festival via the official website