“After I saw Zootopia 2 I wondered if our whole film’s budget was enough to make just one scene in that. Probably not,” says director Toe Yuen Kin-to of the then-new Disney behemoth. It was around Christmas 2025, and Yuen’s latest, A Mighty Adventure (小蟲蟲大冒險), was just starting to make the rounds on the festival circuit after its world premiere at the Golden Horse Film Festival in Taipei. Its US$2 million budget was 75 times smaller than that of Zootopia 2.
A Mighty Adventure lost the Best Animated Feature prize to fellow Hongkonger Tommy Ng Kai-chung’s Another World — which became Hong Kong’s highest-grossing locally produced animated film — though it did take home Best Sound Effects. Which may be slightly ironic, as A Mighty Adventure has no spoken dialogue.
It’s been a long road to release for the melancholy hybrid animation. The film’s blend of live action and animation might immediately call to mind Robert Zemeckis’s groundbreaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) and Ralph Bakshi’s more adult Cool World (1992), but A Mighty Adventure cleaves closer to Gints Zilbalodis’s Oscar-winning Flow (2024) and Spanish director Pablo Berger’s Robot Dreams (2023). The adventure of the title sees three friends — a tiny grasshopper, his new spider friend and the grasshopper’s crush, a butterfly — on a road trip. The action begins when the grasshopper and butterfly are caught in a human child’s insect net and carried from their woodland home to the city; the spider follows in a rescue bid.
A long time coming
“The story idea dates back to 2007. At the time things weren’t so good in film production [in Hong Kong], though compared to now maybe it was better. I don’t know,” Yuen says with a chuckle. “Anyway, one of my friends was working at a special effects house but had no active [projects], so they asked me, ‘Do you have [any] ideas for a movie that demands special effects?’ It was still a young studio, so all they could handle was insects, reptiles, things like that. No hair, no water,” he laughs.
Yuen was happy to help an emerging artist hone their skills, so he let the idea blossom into a film combining live-action backgrounds with CGI insects. He initially imagined something closer to a nature documentary. “I wanted no dialogue and no facial expressions — or at least minimal expressions. But the animator decided to make the ‘characters’ entertaining and easy for the audience to understand.” Seeing himself primarily as a director rather than an animator, Yuen agreed to the modest change. The result was a short trailer that served as a calling card for the investment needed to realise the full concept.
But it was far from smooth sailing after the initial trailer was completed. By 2014, the project had withered on the vine after Yuen failed to find financing, including through the Hong Kong-Asia Film Financing Forum. By then, the Hong Kong Baptist University graduate had spent more than two decades working across comics, special effects and animation. He began experimenting with computer colouring in comics in the early 1990s, later moving into film special effects and 3D animation while making his own short films.
In 2001, he directed My Life as McDull, based on the character created by cartoonists Alice Mak and Brian Tse. The film won the Cristal for best feature at the 2003 Annecy International Animation Film Festival and was followed by McDull, Prince de la Bun in 2004. In between teaching and serving on funding juries, Yuen directed CJ7: The Cartoon (2010), based on Stephen Chow Sing-chi’s science-fiction comedy CJ7, and co-directed The Great Detective Sherlock Holmes—The Greatest Jail-Breaker (2019) with Matthew Chow. A follow-up, Sherlock Holmes and the Rings of Judgment, is currently in financing, with Yuen and Chow attached to direct.
A dead project comes to life
Around that time, the Hong Kong Arts Centre’s ifva programme gave the project new hope, connecting Yuen with another animation studio developing a different production process. But the plan required investment in software that never materialised, and A Mighty Adventure stalled again. Years passed before a Taiwanese animation-festival curator introduced Yuen to producer Chen Yi-ching.
“She knew I had this dead project, and she set me up with Golden Horse’s Film Project Promotion. I was really worried. I kept thinking, ‘Am I doing something nobody’s asking for?’” Even without a secured budget, Yuen and Taiwan’s Zero One Film began production, hoping for the best — and a little luck. “Then we found FlyStudio in Malaysia,” he says. The studio was willing to take the creative risk.
With the stars finally aligned, Yuen got to work on the film that became A Mighty Adventure. It went on to screen at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, Udine Far East Film Festival, Zlín Film Festival and Hiroshima Animation Season before opening in Hong Kong on 22 August. It is due to screen at Seoul Indie-AniFest in September. The release also coincides with MOViE MOViE’s Anifest, which runs until 19 September and includes screenings of Yuen’s My Life as McDull and McDull, Prince de la Bun.
On the surface, A Mighty Adventure is an anthropomorphic road-movie romp. Scratch that surface, though, and it reveals a more nuanced drama. The grasshopper’s crush on the butterfly never quite becomes a love triangle, but it has a lasting impact on the trio’s dynamic by the time they reach their destination. The resolution is neither happy nor unhappy; it is more resigned than expected for a Category I family film. Yuen, who also wrote the script, doesn’t shy away from the terror of being a small creature in a world full of perilous obstacles: paint, water droplets, birds and robot vacuums.
At just 77 minutes, A Mighty Adventure never wears out its welcome and packs emotional punch, gentle comedy and resonant drama into its efficient runtime without condescending to young viewers or pandering to adults. “We don’t have dialogue but we designed a language for the grasshopper based on real grasshopper sounds, which we used as the basis for sampling,” Yuen says of the award-winning sound effects. “It’s something like R2-D2. We tried to keep it for only when we needed to show some kind of emotion.”
The imagery invites any number of metaphors for kids and adults, but they stay in the background and never distract from Yuen’s inviting animation. The images walk a fine line between photorealistic detail and cartoon simplicity, using vibrant colours that make the insect protagonists stand out against the concrete of their real urban environments. In a word, A Mighty Adventure is delightful — pound for pound, a more satisfying watch than Zootopia 2.
A Mighty Adventure opened in Hong Kong on 22 August.