Featuring the voice of Kôji Yakusho. In Japanese, with English subtitles. Rating unavailable

Anime director Mamoru Hosoda’s Digimon: The Movie may have been an obvious cash-in, but 2012’s Wolf Children plumbed unexpected emotional depths. Like most teen-aimed entertainment in Japan, that title was very girl-centric, but the writer-director’s Disney-spectacular follow-up, The Boy and the Beast, is masculinist to a fault.

The explosively colourful two-hour tale follows an orphaned Tokyo lad called Ren (initially voiced by Wolf Children’s very female Aoi Miyazaki) who stumbles into a parallel world of highly anthropomorphic animals. Here, Hosoda draws on Japanese folk tales, manga tropes, and Hindu cosmology to create a rich hierarchy in which two powerful creatures must ultimately battle for ascension to an elevated lordship that allows them to reincarnate to whatever they want.

The lost nine-year-old is renamed Kyûta—riffing on the Japanese words for both “nine” and “suffering”—by a slobbering bear called Kumatetsu, who makes him his apprentice warrior. (These cartoons lend themselves well to Hollywood dubbing, but do see the subtitled original for a great vocal performance by Kôji Yakusho, of The Eel and Shall We Dance. Also, the English version features a no-name cast.) Our outsized bear is desperate to defeat big boar Iozan (Kazuhiro Yamaji), who represents all the noble traits held dear in the animal kingdom. But Kumatetsu lacks discipline of all kinds, something he predictably learns from his disciple. Meanwhile, how come no one notices that Iozan’s fierce son (Kappei Yamaguchi) is also a human, in a plush-animal costume?

Along the way, the now-teenaged Kyûta (Shôta Sometani) realizes that life isn’t all about strength; on a trip back to Tokyo’s beautifully rendered Shibuya district he meets a similarly introspective girl (Suzu Hirose) who hips him to book learning—and specifically to Moby Dick, leading to a big Melville-esque finish, built on themes of revenge and redemption. The story elements are fairly well balanced, but it’s hard to shake off the feeling that, even in a philosophical fantasy world, women remain mere distant helpmates, and men do all the fun stuff.