Tokyo International Film Festival 2025 Animation Lineup Includes Angel’s Egg 4K and New Kawamori Film

The 38th Tokyo International Film Festival announced the lineup for its Animation category, running from October 27 to November 5, 2025. This year’s selection includes world and Japanese premieres across a range of styles, from a new Shōji Kawamori feature to a beloved 1985 classic getting a long overdue 4K restoration.

Kawamori’s Labyrinth is his first original feature-length film not based on an existing franchise. Produced at SANZIGEN with character design by Risa Ebata and a script by Taichi Hashimoto, the film centers on Shiori Maezawa, an ordinary high school girl who finds herself stranded in a deserted parallel version of Yokohama after her smartphone breaks. She discovers photos of herself on social media that she never posted, and must navigate a strange digital labyrinth to stop an alternate version of herself. The film opened in Japan on January 1, 2026.

The Obsessed is a musical anime film adapting Shinji Ishii’s 2001 novel Toritsukare Otoko. Directed by Wataru Takahashi at Shinei Animation with a script by Naoyuki Miura, the story follows Giuseppe, a man whose neighbors call him obsessed due to his habit of becoming completely fixated on different things in short bursts. When he falls in love at first sight with a balloon seller named Pechka, he tries to use every obsession he has ever had to help break through the sadness she carries. The film opened in Japan on November 7, 2025.

Edge of Time is a 97-minute anthology film featuring four short films, two by Japanese directors Shinichirō Watanabe and Shuhei Morita and two by Chinese directors Li Wei and Weng Ming. The pieces are unified by the theme of Taisu, described as an energy that transcends time and space.

The most historically significant screening may be the 4K remaster of Angel’s Egg, the 1985 original video anime co-created by Mamoru Oshii and Yoshitaka Amano. After world premiere screenings at Cannes and appearances at Fantastic Fest and the New York Film Festival, the TIFF screenings on October 29 and 30 brought the remaster to Japanese audiences for the first time. Director Oshii and voice actress Mako Hyōdō appeared after the October 30 screening. The remaster debuted in Japanese theaters on November 14, expanding nationwide on November 21, and GKIDS is distributing it in North America starting November 19. The festival also screened Momotaro, Sacred Sailors, the 74-minute 1945 animated film often recognized as Japan’s first feature-length animation, alongside several other anime and international animated works.

My take: Getting to see Angel’s Egg in 4K is something that feels genuinely rare. That film has always been hard to discuss without sounding breathless, and the fact that it is finally getting theatrical distribution in North America through GKIDS means a lot of people will experience it on a proper screen for the first time. That alone makes this TIFF lineup memorable.