Katsuhiro Ôtomo’s Akira and Lee Unkrich’s Toy Story 3 are among the animated titles that will screen at the TIFF Lightbox as part of Drawn Universes: Visions in Animation, the animation season guest-curated by veteran Japanese filmmaker Masaaki Yuasa.

Drawn Universes: Visions in Animation will run from November 19 to December 29 at TIFF Lightbox. The series features 17 features and four shorts selected by Yuasa. On November 28, Yuasa will take part in an In Conversation With… event at the Lightbox. He will also introduce screenings of Richard Williams’ The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time (November 27) and Isao Takahata’s Anne of Green Gables: Road to Green Gables (November 28).

Drawn Universes: Visions in Animation launches with Paul Grimault’s The King and the Mockingbird on Friday, November 19, and will kick off with an opening reception. Other titles featured as part of the season include Fantastic Planet (1973) by René Laloux, which will be screened from a 35mm print; Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993); and Gisaburō Sugii’s Night on the Galactic Railroad Gisaburō Sugii, also screening from a 35mm print. Scroll down for the full list of titles.

“In curating this series, I wanted to look back at films that sparked my own imagination and influenced both my predecessors and the generations that followed,” Yuasa said in a statement.

Director Yuasa began his career working on the TV series Chibi Maruko-chan and Crayon Shin-chan. His feature directorial debut was Mind Game (2004), which won several honours, including the Japan Media Arts Festival Grand Prize and awards at the Fantasia International Film Festival. He later directed The Tatami Galaxy and Ping Pong the Animation, and in 2013 co-founded the Japanese animation studio Science SARU with Eunyoung Choi.

He directed an episode of Adventure Time, earning an Annie Award nomination, and won Animation of the Year at the Japan Academy Awards for The Night Is Short, Walk On Girl. He left Science SARU in 2020 after Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken!, later receiving the Medal with Purple Ribbon in 2021. He directed Inu-Oh, which earned nominations at both the Golden Globes and the Annie Awards. In 2025, Yuasa established a new studio, Ame Pippin, Inc.

PROGRAMMING SCHEDULE

November 19, 6:30pm
The King and the Mockingbird (1980)
dir. Paul Grimault
Recorded introduction by Masaaki Yuasa
(Opening night film, preceded by a reception)

November 20, 6pm
AKIRA (1988)
dir. Katsuhiro Ôtomo

November 21, 2pm
Pinocchio (1940)
dirs. Bill Roberts, Wilfred Jackson, Ben Sharpsteen, Jack Kinney, T. Hee, Norman Ferguson, Hamilton Luske

November 21, 4:30pm
Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
dir. Hayao Miyazaki

November 22, 2pm
Night on the Galactic Railroad (1985) 35mm
dir. Gisaburō Sugii
Recorded introduction by Masaaki Yuasa
Programming Partner: with Japan Foundation Toronto

November 22, 5pm
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
dir. Mamoru Hosoda

November 24, 6:30pm
AKIRA (1988)
dir. Katsuhiro Ôtomo

November 25, 6:30pm
The Triplets of Belleville (2003) 35mm
dir. Sylvain Chomet
Recorded introduction by Masaaki Yuasa

November 26, 6:30pm
Fantastic Planet (1973)
dir. René Laloux
In-person introduction by Mark Jones
Community Partner: Sheridan College Faculty of Animation, Arts and Design

November 27, 6:30pm
The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time (1992)
dir. Richard Williams
In-person introduction by Masaaki Yuasa

November 28, 4:30pm
Anne of Green Gables: Road to Green Gables (2010)
dir. Isao Takahata
In-person introduction by Masaaki Yuasa
Programming Partner: Japan Foundation Toronto

November 28, 6:30pm
In Conversation With… Masaaki Yuasa
Programming Partner: OCAD University

November 29, 4pm
Fantastic Planet (1973) 35mm
dir. René Laloux

December 2, 6:30pm
Lupin the 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro (1979)
dir. Hayao Miyazaki

December 4, 6:30pm
The Triplets of Belleville (2003) 35mm
dir. Sylvain Chomet
Recorded introduction by Masaaki Yuasa

December 5, 4pm
The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
dir. Mamoru Hosoda

December 6, 4pm
Ghost Cat Anzu (2024)
dir. Yôko Kuno, Nobuhiro Yamashita
Programming Partner: The Toronto International Reel Asian Film Festival

December 10, 6:30pm
The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
dir. Henry Selick

December 12, 4:45pm
The King and the Mockingbird (1980)
dir. Paul Grimault
Recorded introduction by Masaaki Yuasa

December 13, 2pm
The Thief and the Cobbler: A Moment in Time (1992)
dir. Richard Williams

December 13, 4:30pm
Long Way North (2015)
dir. Rémi Chayé

December 18, 6:30pm
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
dir. Mamoru Oshii
Recorded introduction by Masaaki Yuasa

December 19, 3:30pm
Toy Story 3 (2010)
dir. Lee Unkrich

December 20, 2pm
Relaxed Screening: The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993)
dir. Henry Selick

December 20, 4pm
Anne of Green Gables: Road to Green Gables (2010)
dir. Isao Takahata

December 22, 6:30pm
Shorts Films Curated by Masaaki Yuasa:
Rock-a-Bye Bear (1952) dir. Tex Avery / Hedgehog in the Fog (1975) dir. Yuri Norstein / The Man Who Planted Trees (1987) dir. Frédéric Back / Wallace & Gromit: The Wrong Trousers (1993) dir. Nick Park

December 24, 2pm
Ghost in the Shell (1995)
dir. Mamoru Oshii
Recorded introduction by Masaaki Yuasa

December 27, 3pm
Galaxy Express 999 (1979)
dir. Rintarô

December 29, 6:30pm
Liz and the Blue Bird (2018)
dir. Naoko Yamada

Sofia Coppola spoke tenderly about her late mother and their family’s film legacy at a BFI London Film Festival session on Thursday afternoon.

The Oscar winner, best known for directing The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006), admitted she couldn’t have made the latter without the awards success of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s Tokyo-set genre mash-up. “You kind of get a free pass to do whatever you want,” she told interviewer Edith Bowman at London’s Royal Festival Hall. “I wouldn’t have been able to make [Marie Antoinette] before because it was a big-scale, big-budget movie. So because [Lost in Translation] was successful, people [were] approaching me, ‘What do you want to do?’”

Her answer? A deliciously vibrant, sugary take on the ill-fated 18th-century Queen of France with Kirsten Dunst in the titular role. Eleanor Coppola — who had Sofia with fellow filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola in 1971 — turned the camera on her daughter and captured over 80 hours of behind-the-scenes and on-set action while musing on what it means for a mother to watch her 34-year-old daughter at work. The documentary Making Marie Antoinette, assembled by Sofia Coppola and editor Aaron Matthews with input from Eleanor’s close friends, is screening here at the 70th London Film Festival, two-and-a-half years after Coppola’s death.

When Coppola came to film her daughter (who actually shot at the Palace of Versailles), Sofia remembered the documentarian immediately switching into filmmaker mode. “But it was really nice to have her on set because it was a big, stressful, daunting project,” said the younger Coppola. “And when my mom shows up… Everyone was happy to have my mom there because she’s such a grounding presence, and something she always loved to visit. […] And she loved being on that set because she loved the costumes and all the visual beauty and seeing the flowers and corsets.”

Coppola wasn’t aware just how much footage her mother had in the archives. “I went home to Northern California… and she was like, ‘Oh, let’s get out that footage.’ She wanted to revisit it, and I’d never seen it before. And then there were hours of all this footage on set, and it really brought me back. She was excited about it, like: ‘Let’s make it into some major thing. What can we do with it?’ So we started talking about what could happen with it,” Coppola recalled, “and then she passed away a few years ago. At the end of her life, she said, ‘I want my book to be published, and I want this film to be finished.’ And so I felt like, ‘Okay, I have to do it.’”

In a very sweet moment, Coppola reflected on being a parent now and why that’s informed her relationship with the doc. “I didn’t realize how challenging it would be, but it was also a gift to spend time seeing that set [through] my mom’s eyes, and then see her as a mother watching me. Now I have almost- grown daughters. I can see it as a mother, so it was a really meaningful project for me to work on.”

Bowman took Coppola through the major milestones of her career, including Virgin Suicides, which was born out of her desire to depict authentic teenage relationships. “Growing up, I didn’t see movies where the teenage girls were normal… I just didn’t see a lot of characters that I related to and treated young people with respect,” she explained. “The teen movies were always cheap and had bad photography!”

The audience was shown a clip from her melancholy drama for dreamers, Lost in Translation, and Coppola lauded the improv work from Bill Murray, revealing that she spent a year trying to track him down for the film and wouldn’t have made it without his involvement.

On the subject of Marie Antoinette — which received mixed reviews upon release but has gone on to become quite the cult classic — Coppola recalled: “At the time, people did not like [Dunst’s] performance. I think they were like, ‘What’s going on with the different accents?’” she laughed. Coppola later said about her many collaborations with the U.S. actress: “She just had this quality that was so unique, this depth in her eye and this sense of humor, this playful quality.”

At the very end of the session, Bowman asked: What could we expect next? Coppola replied that after working on two documentary features (her Marc Jacobs film hit last year’s Venice Film Festival), she’s still enthralled by “movie magic” and is going back to “writing, creating, imagining the world and imagining the challenge.”

The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs Oct. 7-18.