Courtesy of Kebrado
Audio By Carbonatix
The future is creeping up on us, quiet and unassuming. It does not always announce itself with flying cars or neon-soaked dystopias. Sometimes, it looks exactly like a vintage Nissan 300ZX cruising down a lonely highway, carrying a dying man and the young woman hired to ferry him toward his digital afterlife. At least that’s what it looks like in Anima, a deeply moving, cross-cultural retrofuturistic drama, which made its world premiere at this year’s South by Southwest Film & TV Festival. But while the film flirts with high-concept science fiction, its heart remains entirely and painfully human.
At the center of this journey is Sydney Chandler, a Texas native and recent star of Noah Hawley’s series Alien: Earth, where she played a character grappling with questions of identity and humanity that resonate with her role in Anima. Chandler anchors the film with a fully-realized, quietly devastating performance. She plays Beck, an antisocial engineer grieving the recent loss of her father.
Beck takes a job at a company that preserves human consciousness in a cloud system, a technological workaround for mortality. Her assignment is to drive Paul, a lonely Japanese button manufacturer played with stoic vulnerability by Takehiro Hira, to his final appointment. Paul is dying, but before he transitions his mind into a digital copy, he must wrestle with a lifetime of regret, particularly his estrangement from his son.
For Chandler, returning to Austin for the SXSW premiere of Anima is a homecoming in more ways than one. The story’s focus on fathers and daughters resonates deeply with her, especially given her relationship with her own father, Kyle Chandler, known to many Texans as Coach Taylor from Friday Night Lights.
Reflecting on this, Chandler shares with the Observer, “I think we all have complicated relationships with our parents in some way. My dad means a lot to me, and stories about fathers and daughters always hit home. Working on a film that touches on grief and how we hold onto memories… made me appreciate those connections even more.”
A Lone Star on the Rise
Just days before the festival, Chandler was honored with the Rising Star Award at the Texas Film Awards and was inducted into the Texas Film Hall of Fame, a recognition that caught her slightly off guard.
“It’s really special to my heart, and I never, ever thought that I would be there, let alone be honored, and so it was really amazing,” Chandler says. “Austin itself is such an incredible community, and to see all of the creatives here in my home is really special.”
Courtesy of Austin Film Society
Though her acting career takes her across the globe, Chandler’s roots remain firmly grounded in Texas. Growing up in and around Austin, she spent considerable time in Houston and holds a deep affection for the vast, eclectic landscapes of the Lone Star State.
“Marfa is my go-to,” she admits, before laughing at her own geographical blind spot. “I still have not gone to Big Bend, which blows my mind.”
It is easy to see how Texas shapes her worldview and her craft. There is a groundedness to Chandler that translates directly to the screen. When playing a character like Beck — someone navigating the sterile, overwhelming implications of digitized souls and artificial longevity — Chandler draws on the tactile, earthy elements of her real life to stay anchored.
“The way that I do it is coming home to Austin and being with my cats, who are the most calming creatures to me in the world,” she says. “I work with horses a lot. I do some equine therapy work. I feel most like myself when I have dirt under my nails, and I’m covered in the smell of horse manure, or I’m out on the paddleboard. Those are the things that keep me grounded.”
That connection to the natural world stands in stark contrast to the themes explored in Anima. The film operates on a fascinating wavelength. It is rich with big ideas about how humans might someday copy themselves to cheat death, but it refuses to let its sci-fi framework overshadow the emotional narrative. If Blade Runner ditched the rain-slicked noir aesthetic to focus entirely on Rutger Hauer’s desperate quest to understand his own mortality, it might look something like Anima.
The film strips away the noise and focuses on the quiet terror of knowing the end is near. Paul fears that the digital version of himself will not be his true self. He clings to the objects, memories and places that defined his physical existence. Beck, meanwhile, is trapped in her own internal tug-of-war. She is just trying to do her job, but she is also a grieving daughter, and the parallels between Paul’s estranged family and her own complicated relationship with her late father slowly break down her antisocial barriers.
Chandler and Hira share a remarkable chemistry. Their bond unfolds organically over the course of the road trip, a delicate dance of learning, healing and self-reflection.
“Working with Takahiro was just terrifying and a dream,” Chandler says.
The production itself felt like a journey of discovery. Directed by a filmmaker making his first foray into fictional narrative after a career in documentaries, Anima possesses a distinct, observational quality. The camera lingers on faces, catching the micro-expressions of grief, apprehension and fleeting joy. It watches these characters navigate a complicated world with the patience of a documentarian capturing unscripted truth.
“The adventure of making this film was the best part of it,” Chandler says, though she jokes about the shifting demographics behind the scenes. Surrounded by younger production assistants and producers, she admits she “felt old for the first time on a set.” Yet that sense of time passing only deepens her connection to the film’s central questions. Working on the project, she notes, “felt like a really wonderful experiment of what you can do with film.”
A Reality Just As Strange As Fiction
But beneath the beautiful cinematography and compelling soundtrack lies a chilling undercurrent. Anima asks us to consider what happens when we try to outsmart the natural order of things. It is a question that weighs heavily on Chandler.
“It touches on some pretty scary and now more relevant topics,” she says. “It feels different because we are living in the future now, you know? Those ideas aren’t too far-fetched.”
We exist in an era where artificial intelligence is rapidly evolving, blurring the lines between creation and consciousness. The idea of backing up a human soul to a cloud server feels less like fantasy and more like an inevitable corporate pitch. For Chandler, the prospect of playing God with human life is deeply unsettling.
“I want to stay human and the most human thing to do is to be born and to die,” she says. “Those are our two paths, and I think we should honor that.”
While she does acknowledge the potential of new technology, she remains cautious.
“With AI and all of that too… there’s a silver lining here because it’s a completely new media and if we use it correctly, it could be really cool. But it’s spooky too,” Chandler says. “And the idea of taking consciousness puts the idea of soul into a whole different category. It’s overwhelming to me. It is scary.”
When the existential dread of the digital age becomes too much, Chandler knows exactly how to retreat. She closes her eyes and visualizes the landscapes that shaped her.
“If I am overwhelmed at work, I kind of close my eyes, sit down and think about sitting by the lake [here in Austin],” she tells us.
She has a particular fondness for the peculiar weather patterns of her home state, a seemingly unlikely comfort.
“My favorite aspect of Texas and Austin are those summer afternoon rain showers that will hit for like 20 minutes,” she says. “And the raindrops are the size of pancakes and they’re warm, and for some reason there’s not a cloud in the sky.”
It is a beautifully poetic image, a stark contrast to the cold, artificial clouds where the characters in Anima hope to store their souls. Chandler understands that true life happens in the dirt, in the warm rain and in the messy, finite reality of human connection. Her performance in Anima brings a vital human touch to a story about artificial life, making it one of the festival’s most essential watches.
