Lost In Starlight (2025)

This Korean animated feature length film is the one not nominated for an Oscar in 2026, and while I am almost certainly in the minority, maybe even alone, I liked this much more than the ever so populare K-Pop Demon Hunters. Would be astronaut Nan-young (Kim Tae-ri) has dedicated her life to being selected as a member of the next expedition to Mars, following in the footsteps of her mother who tragically died there in a natural disaster. But when she meets retro tech guru Jay (Hong Kyung) by chance, she discovers a whole new side of life, that will lead to a connection that traverses the solar system. A big aspect of the film’s visual look is clearly anime-style but which captures the kind of positive glimpse of a future world that science-fiction appears to have discarded wholesale in recent years. It’s something akin to more of the same but with changes: it’s a world of holographic displays and garish advertising, people overusing their phones (or equivalents) and using the best that scientists can create to set up a habitat on Mars, but it’s also a world of rainy streets, familiar cityscapes, people going gaga for retro tech in a trendy fashion and good ol’ fashioned communications through aerials dug into the ground. In fact, Lost In Starlight feels like a love-letter to analog in a lot of ways, to old forms of tech that cyclically come back into fashion, with a late-in-the-game hallucinogenic sequence really making the point about the longevity of vinyl. It’s use of tightly cut montage techniques are also stellar, giving the film a needed sense of vibrancy even when it might otherwise not seem like it has such a thing. Speaking as a lover of things that are mechanical, it was fun for me, and better than the plot that runs through it, which was fine, and for an animated movie good even, but nothing to write home about.