Grandma and Her Ghosts

Wang and Huang's animated feature has things in common with their live-action films, especially the mix of 'dark' satire and 'light' fantasy, but this is a more purposive attempt to win back the Chinese audience lost to Hollywood. A small boy parked on his scary old grandma during a family crisis accidentally releases an evil spirit imprisoned in a jar in her back yard. It possesses grandma's cat Kulo and goes on a ghost-eating rampage before targeting grandma herself - she being a Taoist, adept at guiding hungry, roaming ghosts in the annual fortnight of freedom they enjoy before going for reincarnation. It gets the balance of frissons and laughs, cuteness and pathos just about right. (Park Jun-Nam was the animation director.