I'm BrunoDias, a São Paulo-based designer (systems, narrative, mechanics) and writer working in video games.Azhdarchid (named after the family of large pterosaurs) is my personal blog; I also have a more professional landing page at brunodias.dev.
You may know me from such video games as Where the Water Tastes Like Wine, Neo Cab, Pathologic 2 and 3, or Fallen London—you can see my full credits on MobyGames. I also edit the Game Narrative Reader, a link anthology of great essays about video game narrative design on the web.
I put off seeing this in theaters then when I went out to see it I fucking twisted my ankle on the street instead so I ended up not seeing it, and having become Sad about it I proceeded to put off watching it for a year. That's my excuse.
Too shaggy and off-kilter to call a "perfect" movie, but inescapably great. Just one of those movies that has another incredible thing behind every corner. Kleber if nothing else proves to be one of the greatest to ever do it simply with how great every last performance is in this movie.
I think this hits very different if it comes out even one year ago. In this environment it feels like what you're buying is a ticket for two hours of respite for slop world (so you can walk out and immediately find out that Letterboxd might be bought by the fascist new york times, in which case this review, and everything else on my account, will be promptly deleted from the website. sorry. I syndicate them all to my blog.)
I think Laika knows this; at the very end of the credits sequence, they show just a few brief shots of the process. One of a puppet's outfits being carefully sewn by hand; seemingly endless racks of minutely different faces that they 3D-printed out to animate Prue's facial expressions; the faint ghost of an animator moving with time-lapse speed, days of work to create seconds of footage. It feels pointed. It feels like the people who made this movie looking across the screen at me and going "yeah, we know."
It's a very hard movie to analyze, I think. I could sit here and pick this script apart, although I wonder how much of the impulse there is less about the screenplay having problems and more about it just not being as thematically tidy as you kind of expect a kid's movie to be. It is a kid's movie, thematically and structurally, but it's also way more dark and violent than a typical kid's movie (complete with PG-13 rating).
It's a kind of movie we don't see so much these days, the kid's movie that—if you watch it at just the right age—will rewire a child's entire brain. This is going to be some kid's Secret of Nihm or Last Unicorn in a way that I don't think Laika's previous work would quite have hit, precisely because it is so dark and violent. It does have that Coraline quality of being a movie for children about how your parents are, inevitably, flawed people who'll disappoint you.
Visually, of course, there is nothing else that comes close to this and there won't be... probably until Laika makes another movie, which I hope they do; I hope this movie makes a gazillion dollars. This is a movie featuring what I can only describe as the stop-motion Battle of Helm's Deep. It is constantly pushing the boundaries of what you think stop motion could do, then subtly reminding you that you are watching puppets get moved about on a one-eighth-scale world. Laika's approach to stop motion is so unbelievably refined now that it feels kind of warm and fuzzy when you spot just a little tiny bit of that staccato quality you normally expect.
This was probably one of the most valuable experiences I had in a theater all year, so the fact that I almost don't want to rate it that highly "as a movie" in some abstracted, ethereal sense is perhaps more a me problem than a problem with this movie. I think you should see this in a theater. I feel like the term "masterpiece" gets thrown around too casually but this is about as much of a masterpiece, in the very literal sense that it's a demonstration of surpassing mastery of a craft, as anything you'll see all year.
On recognizing the battle line when it appears outside your window.
A little over a week ago, on the night of the Brazilian election runoff, I spent several hours going slowly from despair, to cautious hope, to a sort of weary joy. I live, these days, in a downtown area of São Paulo. I generally hate crowds, but on that night I did walk the length of Avenida Paulista, the city's de facto public square, where people were gathering—at first just to celebrate, and later on to hear president Lula's victory speech, which he delivered in front of the iconic Modernist hulk of the São Paulo Museum of Art.
Ever since I have been periodically reminded of everything that was under threat in the event of another Bolsonaro government, of the losses we couldn't afford that now look to be averted, and of the effort needed to get this outcome.
And I'm also periodically reminded of who was on the other side of this effort; an unpleasant alliance of fascists and criminals who anticipated breaking the nation down for parts. And fighting right alongside them: Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. Meta, in particular, directly intervened in suppressing pro-Lula messaging on Instagram while artificially boosting pro-Bolsonaro messaging.
Big tech behaves as a political actor, and they support fascists. Google and Amazon supply cloud infrastructure that Israel's government and military uses in the prosecution of their ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, as does Microsoft. Tech CEOs have made repeated shows of support and even subservience to the Trump administration.
These companies are embedded in all of our lives, but at the same time they have to be understood as hostile and categorically evil entities. At present, they are all heavily involved in the AI push, which is its own novel form of mass harm that abuts, but isn't exactly the same as, the other forms of harm that these corporations are involved in.
I really do believe at this point that AI is going to be the most harmful new technology of the 21st century. If it is not reined in, it is our time's version of leaded gasoline: ubiquitous and ubiquitously poisonous, a massive corporate assault on the common welfare of human beings and the planet.
Some of those harms are inherent to the technology; I do not believe that it is plausibly safe for everyone to be in conversation with an LLM chatbot regularly, and I've found people who are have their judgment become severely questionable very rapidly. I don't think it is a positive development for mathematicians to be pulling the lever on a counterexample slot machine that precludes actual development of new techniques or the personal development of new mathematicians. I don't think the rapid, thoughtless generation of large volumes of source code that nobody has ever read is likely to be positive for software.
The tech, in itself, will always be more adept at generating spam than useful output, will always be more useful to spammers and grifters than to well-meaning actors. It is a semiotic pollutant that attacks the foundations of social and epistemological trust. These systems should not exist. They should not be deployed, they should not be used, by anyone, for any purpose.
But beyond the inherent harmful nature of the tech, the social system that promotes and builds up these systems is itself engaged in mass harm, independently of what LLM systems themselves do. Hyperscalers are standing up new gas turbine capacity that, if they have their way, will set back the US' emissions targets by a decade. The data center build-up is an environmental, labor, and economic disaster. It is sucking the air out of everything else—literally the US would be in recession right now if not for data center construction.
The credit crunch is hitting other venture capital intensive industries like video games; the main impact of AI on the games industry are that no one can afford RAM and there's no funding to make video games. Microsoft's pivot to AI alone is responsible for thousands of jobs lost and the destruction of several important and storied game studios.
All of those harms and all of those forces are, fundamentally, connected. Big tech is a force for disinformation, for the promotion of fascism, for the ruination of our cultural environment and also our literal environment. They have chosen a side, and it's not the side of humanity.
What last month clarified for me is that we are not engaged in the normal to and fro of politics, we are in a hybrid conflict against a loosely-defined but very much unified set of forces: tech corporations, fossil fuels, and international fascism arrayed together. They can be fought, and they can be beaten, but it falls on all of us to understand that this is a conflict and there are sides.
Whether you think of it in these terms or not, whether you like it or not, by virtue of being a human being you are in conflict with this adversary, because this adversary has put itself in conflict with humanity. The most basic and universal values are under assault, as is our ability to even articulate those values, as is our shared conception of reality, as is the biosphere itself.
It is fundamental to not understand the current moment as just the adoption shock of a new technology. The technology itself is harmful; but the tech corporations pushing it want to ensure it is an engine of dependency, surveillance, and monopoly.
The people who promote this technology, the people who deploy this technology, are themselves taking a side. It is not a neutral act or a matter of personal convenience. It's signing up to fight, and to fight on the side of those who very nearly knocked of Brazilian democracy a week and a half ago; on the side of new gas turbines; on the side of everything being choked with slop; on the side of total semiotic dissolution.
The actual prompt for this post is that I learned that a friend—or rather, someone I used to respect and consider a friend—has recently taken a job with the AI division of a major tech corporation.
I feel like a lot of us are currently watching people we know fail a moral test, and it can drive one insane to feel like what seems like a clear moral line is a "personal choice" to others. To see people delude themselves with self-serving narratives like "I can steer the way this technology develops from the inside" or "I need to confront what it is head on."
But I wanted to write this specifically to say to other people in this position: No, you're not insane. We are living through a horrific break in human history, and we are going to watch people fail to recognize the battle lines being drawn or simply fail a basic decency check. We are watching a mass betrayal of humanistic values unfold before our eyes. It is natural to be shocked and disgusted.
What it feels like is a civil war; a conflict where we find ourselves opposing people we used to take seriously or even cared about. In video games this has become very stark; big-name indie developers becoming various shades of AI chud while half the people I know in the industry are unemployed and the other half are miserable because of their AI-pilled bosses.
I don't know what the outcome of all this will be, other than I know it will be destructive. The world is simply worse for these systems existing, no matter how many insane bad-faith conversations about "utility" or "capability" you get roped into. It is exhausting and it is miserable to watch.
But it is also true that last month brought the realization that those corporations can be fought, and they can be beaten.
Halloween, 1957. Josephine Sable has a brand-new doctorate in high energy physics, several problems to solve, and no job.
For ECTOCOMP 2026, I am releasing a new, small, free game: First, Second, and Third Persons. A short piece of interactive horror-comedy about death, the stupid side of dark academia, and that feeling one sometimes gets that one has gone to the wrong party, and would very much like to kill everyone in attendance.
