Don't confuse Thomas Chou's HD animation LaMB with the kids-friendly fare of Pixar and Dreamworks. The Taiwan-born but Hong Kong-based digital animator directed the first original HD production for the Animax Asia channel, which hosted a private premiere at AMC Pacific Place on Thursday night.
The hour-long anime-style film is the result of the station's 2007 scriptwriting contest, won by Filipino viewer Carmelo Juinio. The gritty tale is set in the future where prisoners are 'laminated' in special suits rendering prison redundant, with convicts remaining in society to work but not offend. It's a very philosophical topic for Chou (left).
'Personally, I don't think locking somebody up in prison helps offenders to rehabilitate,' the founder of production studio Da Joint theorised. 'It just doesn't make too much sense to me.'
Produced in three months, it actually started as a sensitive romance, but Chou shaped the final result to be more appealing to a game geek like himself. 'We needed to add in some action scenes like a car-chase scene and the fight scene, which weren't in the original script, so we can make it more visual for the audience.'
LaMB will air on Animax from tomorrow. The voice cast is led by Josie Ho Chiu-yee.