Anime is kind of having a moment right now, with titles like Crunchyroll’s Demon Slayer: Infinity Castle making an insane amount of money at the box office. These used to be very niche titles, sometimes only getting a theatrical release through Fathom Events, save for the lucky Studio Ghibli title, but now after over a decade of anime centric streaming services, making more and more titles widely and easily available, it is the moment. And, when you bask in the glory of popularity, the reaction the public has to your format, it seems that causes a level of introspection on internet fame and social media prowess.

Labyrinth gave me vibes of both Pixar, who loves to climb into the world beyond in films like Inside Out and Monsters Inc., but also this magical realism Studio Ghibli deals with in its fables of coming of age in a fantastical environment. I had vibes also of Spirited Away and The Boy and the Heron.

I’m not someone who has never seen anime. I have a feeling I’ve seen more anime than I realize, but even when I was trying to get into more mainstream Ghibli titles, I was still moving through early 2000’s titles like Spriggan and Metropolis. But, the sad truth for a long time, once I started to lose my vision, is that a lot of anime just isn’t audio described. hell, the community still seems moderately affronted by dub tracks, which is the bare minimum I need to get through an anime title. Last year, the team behind Little Amelie or the Character Of Rain was hesitant to get me a dub track for consideration, until I explained that I literally could not watch or consider the film without it. I should have audio description, we should on every film, but as companies continue to placate the obnoxious trolls raging against DEI and presumed wokeness, a 100% audio described film future is a pipe dream.

Hopefully, this film gets audio description from someone like Amazon, which just tosses AI audio description indiscriminately on films and TV shows, because Labyrinth is likely a visual feast. The director worked on the Escaflowne franchise, one of the more notable anime titles, and the specific animation studio behind this likes to use CG animation that looks hand drawn.

But the plot is the reason for the season. Labyrinth takes a hold of our social media culture, our demand for likes and subscribes, and how we are addicted to our phones, and creates a parable about a young girl who gets sucked into her phone when she accidentally cracks it and drops it, following an embarrassing leak of a video she’d prefer her peers didn’t see. From this point, she sees everything from a new perspective, as she’s trapped in the broken phone world, inhabited by another man who broke his phone a while ago, and shows her around. She has limited time to figure a way out, before she becomes a sticker (is this how we get new emojis?), and regain her life from a mirror version of herself that leapt out of the phone, more socially engaging than she is, and determined to spread brain rot to her peers. What is a girl to do?

It has all this commentary and imagination, which shows up for quite a while, until it introduces a character who may or may not be willing to help, who may or may not have created an app that caused all of this to happen in the first place.the only complaint I have with Labyrinth is that it has a hard time keeping up with its glorious pacing, lagging mostly once that guy comes into the frame.

You’ll have to venture to the cinemas fast if you want to see this story unfold, since GKids is giving it a very limited two-day theatrical release, on May 10th and 11th, 2026. I’ve seen now two animated films in the last week, this and Swapped, both of which are at least as good as the Top 5 animated films from last year. That bodes well for the rest of the year, if the bar has been raised. It was weird for me to not have an animated feature in my Top 10 last year, but there were some in the broader Top 30. I’m hoping for another Wild Robot to blow me away. This film could ahve done it, but either needed audio description to fully immerse me, or to trim about ten minutes from the runtime, mostly from one character.

Truly, for the first third of this, I was captivated by how engaging it was, even without audio description, and how remarkably intelligent the satire is, commenting on our reliance not just of social influencing, but also on our smart phones. This film points out how much we really do with our phones, so when she swaps with the digital version, that digital version has all this information it has been learning about her, including her financial information. What if a clone of yours was waiting inside your phone? What would it know about you?

A modern day Alice Through The Looking Glass, if Wonderland was a social media influencer nightmare living in your smart phone. Truly tremendous in its pointed takedown of our tech reliance, Labyrinth is a fantasy and a fable, embracing the magic, while commenting on societies need for digital approval, and anxiety over a lack thereof. Every online critic that has to ask for likes and subscribes should be required to review this. By the way, like and subscribe.

Fresh: 8.1/1/10