Animation Film Double at FOMO Cinema Tbilisi

Tuesday 5 May

Wicked City: 19:30
Intermission: 21:00
Gandahar: 21:10
END: 22:35

IMPORTANT: Tickets purchased on this page are for the film double. If you only wish to see one of Tuesday's animations please visit the relevant ticketing page here.

Animation 1: WICKED CITY - 19:30
Yoshiaki Kawajiri | 1987 | Japan | 1h22m | Presented in the original Japanese audio with English subtitles

WICKED CITY is one of the landmark works of late 1980s adult animation, a film that helped define a darker, more nocturnal strain of anime at the point where horror, noir and urban fantasy began to bleed into each other. Set in a Tokyo where the human world coexists uneasily with a hidden demon realm, it follows a secret agent assigned to protect the signing of a fragile peace treaty. Kawajiri fills the screen with wet neon, shadowy interiors, grotesque metamorphoses and the sense that the city itself has become unstable. The film was based on Hideyuki Kikuchi’s novel and produced by Madhouse, with Kawajiri not only directing but also serving as character designer, storyboard artist, animation director and key animator.

The production history matters because WICKED CITY was not originally conceived at feature length. Kawajiri was first hired to direct a much shorter OVA adaptation, but once the producers saw the initial animation they expanded it into an 80-minute film. That shift gave him more room to shape the world and its moods, and you can feel the ambition in every frame. This was also his solo directorial debut, which makes the film even more important in retrospect. Before NINJA SCROLL and VAMPIRE HUNTER D, Kawajiri was already building the visual language that would become inseparable from his name: elaborate action choreography, adult fantasy, and cities that seem alive after dark in all the wrong ways. Even Hayao Miyazaki reportedly admired Kazuo Oga’s art direction enough to later bring Oga onto MY NEIGHBOR TOTORO.

WICKED CITY matters because it belongs to that moment when Japanese animation was proving how far it could stretch beyond family entertainment and television convention. It is messy, lurid, stylish and completely sure of its own tone. In the West, films like this became part of the gateway into a more adult idea of anime, and their influence on cult viewing culture was enormous. Kawajiri would go on to become one of the key names in that space, but WICKED CITY is where the template is already fully visible.

Animation 2: GANDAHAR - 21:10
René Laloux | 1987 | France | 1h18m | Presented in the original French audio with English subtitles

With GANDAHAR, René Laloux made animated science fiction that feels dreamlike on the surface and deeply pessimistic underneath. Set on a distant utopian planet threatened by a force of metallic destruction, it begins like fantasy and gradually reveals itself as something colder and more unsettling, a film about time, mutation, memory and the fragility of any civilisation that believes itself beyond history. René Laloux had already made FANTASTIC PLANET and TIME MASTERS, so by the time he came to GANDAHAR he was already one of the key figures in adult European animation. What makes this film distinctive even within his body of work is its elegance, the calm surface, the ornate design, and the creeping sense that catastrophe is already built into the world from the start.

The film matters in part because of the collaboration behind it. Laloux adapted Jean-Pierre Andrevon’s novel and worked with the great illustrator Philippe Caza, whose designs give GANDAHAR its distinctive visual identity, soft, organic, sensuous, and then suddenly interrupted by machinery, violence and deformation. That contrast is central to the film’s power. The world of Gandahar is full of beauty, but it is not innocent. Laloux was always drawn to speculative fiction that carried an argument inside it, and here the argument concerns the arrogance of perfect societies, the violence hidden inside technological futures, and the way political complacency leaves entire cultures exposed. Few animated films from the 1980s are this interested in ideas.

GANDAHAR also belongs to a period when European animation was still willing to be literary, conceptual and openly adult without chasing the rhythms of American commercial animation. It did not become a mass-market classic, but it has endured as a cult object for viewers interested in the stranger edges of science fiction cinema. Its reputation now sits alongside Laloux’s other major films, and rightly so. GANDAHAR is full of inventions, visual, narrative and philosophical, and it carries that rare feeling of a film made from an intact imaginative world rather than a marketable premise. On a big screen, its textures, colours and oddities have room to breathe.

FOOD AND DRINK POLICY: FOMO Cinema Lounge Bar opens 1 hour before the first screening of the day and closes at 02:00,.serving a wide selection of beer, wine, cocktails, and non-alcoholic refreshments including coffee and tea, as well as fresh hot popcorn! Outside food is allowed in the bar but not in the cinema. No alcohol from outside allowed. All guests are invited to arrive early and stay late!

LOCATION: FOMO Secret Cinema, Bazari Orbeliani, Tbilisi. A five minute walk from Liberty Square metro.

HOW TO FIND FOMO: Enter Bazari Orbeliani via Atoneli St above Carrefour and take the stairs on your left to Level 1. Signage on the door. You can also check our Instagram story highlights for a video showing exactly how to find us:
https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17933106294029235/