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The signature edition of "Iron Giant" will have its world premiere next month at the Toronto International Film Festival.

First it was Brad Bird. Now Sylvain Chomet, the director of The Triplets of Belleville and The Illusionist, has switched over to live-action filmmaking. Chomet’s feature debut, Attila Marcel, will premiere tonight at the Toronto International Film Festival. The film is described as follows:

Paul is a sweet man-child, raised — and smothered — by his two eccentric aunts in Paris since the death of his parents when he was a toddler. Now thirty-three, he still does not speak. (He does express himself through colourful suits that would challenge any Wes Anderson character in nerd chic.) Paul’s aunts have only one dream for him: to win piano competitions. Although Paul practices dutifully, he remains unfulfilled until he submits to the interventions of his upstairs neighbor. Suitably named after the novelist, Madame Proust offers Paul a concoction that unlocks repressed memories from his childhood and awakens the most delightful of fantasies.

Chomet, who had earlier dabbled in live-action with a segment in Paris, je t’aime, explained the switch to live-action in an interview with the LA Times:

“I’ve always made animation as if it was a live-action film. I try to make it look almost real, the way it’s edited is not really like an animated film. I try to have continuity in between the shots like live action. I was always thinking of live action but came to live action through animation. That was a way for me to get into live action. Animation is filmmaking, it’s the same thing. And you really train as a director when you do animation. You get the eye, the sense of composition and timing. Live action is very similar to animation apart from animation takes ages and live action goes really fast.”

There’s still some hope for those who appreciate Chomet’s animation films. The Times said that Chomet currently has two features in development—one live-action and one animated—and he plans to make the film that gets funding first.

While the new Hayao Miyazaki film, Kaze Tachinu (The Wind Rises) will not be released in American theaters until sometime next year, attendees of the Venice International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and New York Film Festival will get an opportunity to experience the film much sooner.

Kaze Tachinu, which opened in Japan on July 20th, is based on the life of Jiro Horikoshi, a World War II designer of Zero fighters, including the Mitsubishi A6M Zero which was used by the imperial Japanese navy for kamikaze missions and during the Pearl Harbor bombing.

“My wife and staff would ask me, ‘Why make a story about a man who made weapons of war?” Miyazaki told Japan’s Cut magazine in 2011. “And I thought they were right. But one day, I heard that Horikoshi had once murmured, ‘All I wanted to do was to make something beautiful.’ And then I knew I’d found my subject… Horikoshi was the most gifted man of his time in Japan. He wasn’t thinking about weapons… Really all he desired was to make exquisite planes.”

According to the South China Morning Post, this choice of subject matter, which lead to some veiled jabs at Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has put Miyazaki in the crosshairs of conservative nationalists. He has also found himself defending the film to South Koreans offended of his glorification of a man so closely connected to a Japanese military that used forced laborers from the Korean peninsula. And, the Japan Society for Tobacco Control, has taken issue with the depictions of smoking presented in the film, especially in a scene where the lead character smokes a cigarette while sitting with his wife, who is bedridden and suffering from tuberculosis.

Despite the controversy (or perhaps because of it), Kaze Tachinu was Japan’s biggest opening of the year at ¥960M ($9M US) in its first two days, and has stayed at number for four consecutive weekends with a total box office gross of ¥7.2B ($74.1M US). em>Kaze Tachinu