Anime artist Yoshitoshi Shinomiya (Your Name, The Garden of Woods) is making his feature film directorial debut with an anime film titled A New Dawn.
This is said to be a “profoundly personal film” for the filmmaker and it was inspired by the changing Japanese landscape after the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011.
A New Dawn “unwinds inside an inactive fireworks factory that is about to go into administrative action. For the past four years, young Keitaro has lived inside the derelict structure, chasing the illusion of a father who vanished years before.
“The location used to be nestled in a lush forest, but the surrounding area has recently been redeveloped by the city, which covered the land with solar panels. Only a scant bit of greenery around the factory remains amongst the sea of panels.
“With the end of his makeshift home just around the corner, Keitaro commits to launching a firework his father left behind before the building is repossessed. He recruits his brother and a childhood friend to help close this chapter of his life and bring about a new dawn.”
Shinomiya talked about how the idea for the film sparked, saying: “One day, on the way to my workshop, my child looked out the car window and cried out, ‘I can see the sea!’“
He continued: “I realized that the solar panels my child saw through the trees actually looked like the surface of the water. At that moment, I thought, ‘This is a new scenery of Japan, and the next generation will capture it with this kind of sensitivity, though I saw such landscape as something negative.’ I felt that moment was very meaningful to me, and I believe it was the beginning of this project.”
When talking about the film’s visual influences, he explained: “In developing the scenario, I learned that the paper, seaweed, and pigments used to make Japanese paintings had commonalities with fireworks before the Edo period.”
He added: “I had always held the items as paints detached from such a traditional context, but in fact, for pyrotechnicians, there were materials that could be substituted for gunpowder. That was a very fresh surprise. Even with this kind of modern lifestyle, there was something that such artisan culture of 100 or 200 years ago had in common.”
This sounds like it’s going to be a wonderful film. It’s being produced by Tokyo-based Asmik Ace (Inu-Oh, Tekkonkinkreet) and France’s Miyu Productions (Chicken for Linda, Dozens of Norths).
Key artists working on the film include character designer Utsushita, art director Akiko Majima, and composer Shuta Hasunuma.
A New Dawn is currently in production and will be released sometime in 2025.
