Within the first few minutes of director Shōji Kawamori‘s Labyrinth, protagonist Shiori laments that “without smartphones, humanity would be doomed”. From the events that later transpire, I suspect Kawamori’s opinion is quite the opposite. Kawamori is, of course, best known for his lifetime of work on the Macross franchise, which features mecha battles, idol singers, and love triangles in most of its entries. If you squint a little, each of these main obsessions is also present in Labyrinth. It seems that Kawamori can’t help himself. Whether these elements mesh together to make a satisfying film is another matter entirely. Whereas his most beloved film, Super Dimension Fortress Macross: Do You Remember Love?, is a timeless classic, Labyrinth‘s reliance on modern tech and the anxieties around it almost instantly date it.

At the end of the screening, with my head in my hands, I sighed to myself, “How in hell’s name am I supposed to review this?” It’s a movie that almost defies explanation; any attempt to summarise the plot is likely to leave me gibbering incomprehensibly. I guess I’ll have to try. Suffice to say, Labyrinth is not by any means a “good” film. However, it’s certainly an entertaining one, and often (unintentionally) hilarious. Watching along with a highly engaged audience at the Scotland Loves Anime film festival was probably the best mode of experience for Labyrinth, for without my fellow cinemagoers’ stunned, disbelieving laughter, I doubt I would have survived to the end of its bloated, almost two-hour-long runtime.

Shiori is supposed to be the audience insert, an anxious high school girl who constantly apologizes for her mere existence. The daughter of a titanic judo instructor with the most impressively imposing moustache this side of Ivo Robotnik, she rejects her family’s focus on self-improvement via martial arts. Instead, she records social media videos with her female best friend Kirara. Their friendship is somewhat unequal – Kirara is far more outgoing and confident, and Shiori secretly seethes that her videos accrue far more “likes” from the faceless online masses. In fact, Shiori uses a secret, anonymous account to spew her negativity onto the internet rather than owning it as part of herself.

It’s this sublimated jealousy and insecurity that not only fractures their friendship but also Shiori’s identity. When her beloved smartphone screen cracks, it sends ruptures through her reality, as her persona splits in two – the more anxious version trapped within an almost Silent Hill-like alternative dimension, a shadowy analogue to the real world but empty of people, and a more confident “ideal” version that instantly becomes more outgoing. Ideal Shiori dons a VTuber-style two-tone wig and sets her sights on becoming a modern media superstar, the most popular Japanese high school girl, with a goal of garnering 100 million “likes.” She views her anxious alter ego as an impediment, and frequently taunts her through her apparently cloned smartphone, which seems to be able to dial its identical equivalent in the digital world, somehow without generating network errors.

We mostly view the story through Anxious Shiori’s eyes. She journeys through a dark, ominous liminal space populated by the souls of others similarly sucked into the digital underworld, where they are transformed, unsettlingly, into the smartphone stickers that best approximate their personalities. Anxious Shiori herself tended to contribute to friend group chats mainly via stickers as a way to hide her true emotions, engaging only at a surface level. The constant demand for connectivity and reciprocal communication is shown to be exhausting and all-consuming; so, when Kirara completely disconnects and ghosts Shiori, she panics that maybe Kirara has also been sucked into this world and lost her soul. The only thing preventing Shiori from losing hers is that her smartphone remains charged. Yes, in Labyrinth all that stands between humanity and devolution into mute digital emoticons is the presence of a spare battery pack. I know that I can get anxious when out and about and running low on charge, but Labyrinth takes battery anxiety to the extreme.

Human souls are bound and pressed by enormous industrial devices that pound three-dimensional bodies into flat images, with reams of red digital text spewing from between heavy plates, clearly symbolising blood. It’s cool imagery that I wish the film had leaned into a little more heavily. If anything, the aesthetic is similar to the recent Hatsune Miku movie Colorful Stage, although with significantly less music, unfortunately.

Anxious Shiori meets Komori, a sad-looking pink bunny sticker person who seems to know a lot about this world – the eventual reveal of his true identity is probably meant to be a huge shock, but I guessed it instantly. It’s not the most subtly plotted of films. Komori is quite fun, especially when he becomes so hapless and useless that Shiori has to attach a dog collar and string to drag him around behind her, floating like a balloon and bumping into things.

If it wasn’t already deranged, Labyrinth‘s central plot goes full batshit insane later on, with the evil mastermind Suguru Kagami planning to “liberate everyone’s ideal selves,” and it’s up to Anxious Shiori and Komori to try to prevent this… somehow.

Aesthetically, the film has its moments, especially in the digital underworld that acts as a dark mirror to our own. Unfortunately, all of the character animation is accomplished using 3D CG, which, while it does a reasonable job of emulating 2D animation, lacks any real-life authenticity. The characters move like dolls rather than real, living, breathing characters. There’s something about the natural exaggeration of movement, such as squashing and stretching, and other techniques often employed in traditional animation that bring life to character movement, which is all but absent. Yes, there’s some reasonably amusing slapstick here and there, and funny character expressions, but it’s a far cry from the verve and atmosphere of Kawamori’s previous works.

For much of Labyrinth, the festival audience sat in silence until some of the nuttier plot decisions were met with incredulous guffaws. Mostly, the film plays itself very straight, which is odd for a story featuring a floating pink bunny character and an evil music producer who wants to rule the world. One particular scene where Kagami takes Ideal Shiori to his bedroom and begins to suggestively unzip his tracksuit top was met with hysterical audience laughter that will become obvious if you see the film.

Multiple similar examples litter Labyrinth, and it’s hard to tell if these insane choices that trigger such hilarity are deliberate or not, and that’s why the film is so hard to rate. None of the pieces fit together properly. Anxious Shiori, for most of the film, is a fairly unengaging, dull protagonist, though her fake/ideal version is much more fun, which is probably the point. Kagami makes for a somewhat underwhelming villain, with an unclear plan that seems overly convoluted. The rules of the world seem to change upon the writer’s whim, and crazy stuff happens mostly out of nowhere. It’s like a laundry list of bonkers ideas all strung together without any coherent plan.

I found Labyrinth a struggle to endure, yet found certain aspects very entertaining. Perhaps my mistake was watching it stone cold sober. As one of my fellow festival attendees noted, it’s probably best viewed with at least a few beers on board already. I certainly can’t unreservedly recommend Labyrinth, but if you’re hankering for some good old “WTF am I even watching right now?”, then Labyrinth has you covered.