Shōji Kawamori’s Labyrinth (2025) Movie Review — Scotland Loves Anime 2025

Overall, the Glasgow leg of Scotland Loves Anime 2025 featured a superb selection of films. I hotly anticipated the final movie of the weekend, the mysterious new film from Macross creator Shōji Kawamori. I love pretty much everything Macross, so surely the director of so many of its best franchise entries could do no wrong? Considering my bemused reaction to Labyrinth, I may have to re-calibrate my expectations for Kawamori moving forwards. I really didn’t like it.

Sadly, my review for Anime News Network had to be edited to remove significant spoilers, along with some of my unhinged written reactions to the associated scenes. As the movie doesn’t go on wide release until January 1st next year, the editor (likely wisely) chose not to anger the distributors by releasing a very critical spoiler-packed review onto the internet. Now my readers will never know why I chose to write the sentence “Won’t you probe my void, baby?” I’ll leave it here for you now, sans context, for you to ponder forever.

You can read my Labyrinth review at ANN via the link below:

Keep an eye out for my upcoming SLA 2025 reviews of sports anime movie 100 Meters, and stop-motion Junk Head sequel Junk World, both for ANN. The rest of SLA 2025’s films from Glasgow and Edinburgh already have ANN reviews, so I’ll be writing them up here on the AniTAY blog here on Medium as I find time to do so.

Labyrinth
Director: Shōji Kawamori
Screenplay: Taichi Hashimoto
Music: yonkey
Character design: Risa Ebata
Animation production: SANZIGEN
JP distributor: GAGA Corporation
JP premiere: 28th October 2025, Tokyo International Film Festival
UK premiere: 2nd November 2025, Scotland Loves Anime, Glasgow
Runtime: 116 minutes
Language: Japanese audio with English subtitles
BBFC rating: 15

Kevin Cormack is a Scottish medical doctor, husband, father, and lifelong anime obsessive. He writes as Doctorkev at https://medium.com/anitay-official and appears regularly on The Official AniTAY podcast. You can also find him on Twitter @Herrdoktorkev. His accent is real.