Toe Yuen Kin-To is a Hong Kong animation director, editor and screenwriter. A comics enthusiast from secondary school, he spent time at his cousin Pang Chi-ming's comic shop and once aspired to be a comic artist, but concluded his drawing was not good enough. After graduating in film from Hong Kong Baptist College in 1991 he edited a comics review magazine and briefly wrote for Television Broadcasts' variety unit on Enjoy Yourself Tonight, then moved into visual effects and computer animation at the special-effects house Magic Touch; in his spare time his animated shorts won the local independent short film and video awards in two consecutive years. In 1997 he was invited by Brian Tse, author of the McDull comics, to build an animation team at Lunchtime Production for a McDull television series. In 2001 he directed his first animated feature, My Life as McDull, which won Best Animation Feature at the 39th Golden Horse Awards and the top prize at the 2003 Annecy International Animation Film Festival. He later left the McDull team to strike out on his own, returned to work on McDull, Prince de la Bun (2004), which earned him a Best New Director nomination at the 24th Hong Kong Film Awards, and in 2010 was invited by Stephen Chow to direct the animated CJ7: The Cartoon in Beijing. In the 2010s he also worked in live-action film and television, including Papa, Eman and The Last Dance, and in 2019 co-directed The Great Detective Sherlock Holmes: The Great Jailbreak with Chow Wing-siu. In 2025 his long-gestated dialogue-free animation Little Bugs' Big Adventure was nominated for Best Animation Feature at the 62nd Golden Horse Awards.
Toe Yuen carried McDull from comics to the big screen, giving local animation its first major international festival prize; My Life as McDull won both a Golden Horse award and the top prize at Annecy, raising the international profile of Hong Kong animation, and he has continued to explore local subjects through low-cost animation.
Achievements
- 2001 · Directed his first animated feature, My Life as McDull.
- 2003 · My Life as McDull won the top prize at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival.
- 2019 · Co-directed The Great Detective Sherlock Holmes: The Great Jailbreak.