Scotland Loves Anime 2025: Our Top Five Picks
Scotland Loves Anime returns with a mouthwatering lineup of Japanese animation. Over 20 features screen across four venues in three cities – here are five of our favourites
All You Need Is Kill
Alien creatures are decimating Earth and only one person, who's caught in a time loop of dying and then waking up again at the start of the same day, can stop them. If All You Need Is Kill sounds a lot like Edge of Tomorrow, it's because that Tom Cruise film is also based on the same manga by Hiroshi Sakurazaka. This animated adaptation similarly blends existential dread and a dash of doomed romance to create a nail-biting sci-fi thriller.
Junk World
Indie stop-motion animation Junk Head was made almost single-handedly by animator Takahide Hori; as well as being responsible for most jobs on set, he voiced many of the characters in this steampunk sci-fi. He's now back with prequel Junk World, which we're told is just as strange as the original but even more ambitious in terms of scale and world-building.
ChaO
ChaO sounds a bit like The Little Mermaid flipped on its head. Set in a world where humans and mermaids coexist, it follows a mild-mannered administrator called Stephan, who’s whisked off his feet by Chao, a princess from the mermaid kingdom. Can an office drone and a fish lady find true love? This delightful romance that bursts with life will convince you they can.
The Last Blossom
Anime isn’t all sci-fi and fantasy. This existential drama from Baku Kinoshita concerns an elderly prisoner who's rotting alone in his cell near the end of a long sentence when one day he strikes up a conversation with his only other companion: a balsam flower. This gorgeous film sees the man, a former yakuza, recount his early life and the events that led up to him spending his twilight years incarcerated.
Angel’s Egg
One of the biggest joys of Scotland Loves Anime is that every year it digs into the archive to put some classics back on the big screen. There are plenty of seminal works playing this year, from Golgo 13: The Professional to Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust. Our pick of the older films, however, is Angel's Egg, a spellbindingly beautiful and deeply symbolic fantasy about a girl caring for an egg and a man searching for a bird in a decaying city.
Glasgow Film Theatre, until 4 Nov; Picturehouse Central, London, 7-9 Nov; Filmhouse and Cameo, Edinburgh, 10-16 Nov. Full details at lovesanimation.com