TIFF 2026: How anime co-productions and animated horror get made

The 2026 Tokyo International Film Festival (TIFF) dedicates its second day of coverage to international co-productions. Cartoon Brew focuses on how producers from Asia and Europe join forces to get animated projects made that would otherwise be impossible.

At the TIFFCOM panel, the festival's market, Ervin Han, Taiki Sakurai (Salamander Pictures) and Ilan Urroz (Foliascope) sat down to talk. They discussed money, which in the end is what moves everything: financing structures, the search for partners with complementary strengths, and the differences between public systems in Europe and the reliance on private capital in Asia. No empty technicalities, just producers explaining how they manage to connect artists from different countries and get their films made.

A banquet of ghosts and Chinese food

The main course of the coverage is A Banquet for Hungry Ghosts, Ervin Han's new animated horror anthology. The producer, coming off the success of The Violinist at Annecy, is developing four stories built around Chinese dishes, with studios from Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan and Ireland.

The idea is as simple as it is twisted: make the food look delicious before everything turns horrible. Each story will have a distinct visual approach, and the shared ambition is to make your mouth water just before your skin crawls. A combination that sounds like a gastronomic nightmare of the best kind.

Four films, four ways to animate

The festival coverage also dives into the feature film section, with interviews with the directors of four titles in Tokyo's lineup. Atsushi Nishigori talks about the contrasting styles of Grotesqqque, his three-part omnibus mixing aliens, battle royales and vampire romance.

Masanao Kawajiri, for his part, breaks down Cherry and Virgin, his combination of manga imagery and rotoscoping to explore sex, desire and intimacy. Joel Crawford and Januel Mercado explain how they brought Filipino culture and memories to Forgotten Island, and Sun Xun reflects on the decade of handmade experimentation behind Magic Atlas, a Chinese epic created with 500 artists.

TIFF 2026 continues, and what's clear is that animation is experiencing a moment of international collaboration like rarely seen before. From co-productions between continents to gastronomic horror, the festival is serving a varied menu with plenty to chew on.