TAMALA 2030 Trailer

Carefree, coquettish, and capricious, Tamala is the cutest girl-cat in dystopian Cat Tokyo, year 2030—or at any other point in the time/space continuum. She has randomly invited herself along on her detective friend Michelangelo’s missing-person investigation. It seems the case is one of seven sudden vanishings in an astronomical pattern across Cat Japan that occurred at the exact same moment one night. Their search leads ever deeper into a mystery with ancient, occult roots and apocalyptic implications—and threads leading to Tamala herself. Shadowed by a covert agent of the Catty & Co. consortium, she may in fact be the greatest enigma. Indolent ingénue? Megacorporate mascot? Mythic messiah, or manifestation of cosmic malevolence? Anyhow, wow—she sure is a great dancer!

An astonishing, avant-garde anime anomaly, 2002’s eerie, erotic, and elaborately esoteric TAMALA 2010: A PUNK CAT IN SPACE, a Fantasia award-winner, remains an all-time highlight of the festival’s animation programming. Two short films and a manga followed soon after, but two decades had to elapse before rumours of a follow-up TAMALA feature could at last be proven true. With TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK, the mysterious writer/composer/director duo K. and kuno, known together as t.o.L (“trees of Life”), have resumed, recalibrated, and resolved their tale of Tamala, surpassing themselves in their control of the cryptic, complex, and cuddly chaos they’ve unleashed. The Japanese kawaii paradigm of Hello Kitty and Hatsune Miku collides with cabalistic capitalism, cataclysmic prophecy, and the ruptured realities of Lynch, Pynchon, and Philip K. Dick in TAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK, a deviously dreamlike, metaphysical mind-melt of high-fructose, retro-futuristic, paranoid pop-art brilliance.