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, and more than two decades had to pass before rumours of a follow-up TAMALA feature could at last be proven true. WithTAMALA 2030: A PUNK CAT IN DARK, the mysterious Japanese writer/composer/director duo K. and kuno, known together as t.o.L (“trees of Life”), have resumed, recalibrated, and resolved their tale of the cutest girl-cat in dystopian Cat Tokyo, surpassing themselves in their control of the cryptic, complex, and cuddly chaos they’ve unleashed. The 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 a deviously dreamlike, metaphysical mind-melt of high-fructose, retro-futuristic, paranoid pop-art brilliance. Animation Plus Section. World Premiere.