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Michihito Fujii has been working like a factory lately for Netflix, with the majority of his latest works featuring in the streaming service, including “Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045”, and the more recent “Hard Days” and “Village” among others. His latest work, however, signals a change to a “tamer” narrative, as “The Parades” is a drama about the afterlife, inspired by the Fukushima disaster.

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Minako, a TV reporter and single mother, finds herself roaming the area she lived in after the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, in search of her lost boy. Soon she realizes though, that she is dead and that the living cannot see or hear her. While getting totally lost about her new reality, she is discovered by Akira, a writer who is in the same situation, who takes her under his wing and introduces her to his...

The Parades is a movie written and directed by Michihito Fujii starring Masami Nagasawa, Kentaro Sakaguchi, Ryusei Yokohama, and Nana Mori.

From Japan comes “The Parades”, a lovely film that, we warn you, goes straight to the heart and speaks from the deepest human emotion and the most profound concern of human beings: death.

A film that starts precisely from there, and gradually contrasts it with life, creating a whole ode to life itself in death.

A film, as you may have imagined, full of sentiment and nostalgia, but also of life and hope.

Synopsis:

After an earthquake, a woman feels confused and disoriented as she tries in vain to find her son. A stranger takes her to a camp where he tells her the truth: she is dead, and she still has unfinished business to take care of before she can move on to the other side.

About the film:

This Thursday,...

Romance series Insomniacs After School , which features several locations from Nanao City, Ishikawa Prefecture in Japan, combined scenes from the original manga, anime and live-action adaptations in a special video released today subtitled "You Are Not Alone", paying tribute to areas such as Noto Peninsula that were recently devastated by an earthquake and tsunami. The video was put together to support the current reconstruction efforts. Related: Nana Mori & Daiken Okudaira Play The Leads in Insomniacs After School Live-Action Film Based on the manga by Makoto Ojiro, the Insomniacs After School anime was directed by Yuki Ikeda at studio Liden Films, with series composition by Rintaro Ikeda, character designs by Hiroaki Fukuda and music by Yuki Hayashi. The series aired 13 episodes from April to July, 2023. Viz Media, which publishes the manga's official English version, describes the story: Dark rumors about what befell the members of the astronomy club keep people away from the school observatory,...

It's not the first time that internationally acclaimed maestro Hirokazu Koreeda put his effort on a serial drama. In 2019 he directed the first episode and coordinated the collective show “A Day-Off of Kasumi Arimura” and before that, in 2012, he directed the lovely (a personal favourite) “Going My Home”, starring Hiroshi Abe as a clumsy father struggling with his roles as son and as father too. However, his recent “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House” has been propelled to global audience by the intervention of giant platform Netflix. The show is co-written, co-produced and co-directed by Koreeda, alongside a handful of Japanese filmmakers and is based on a famous manga of the same title that has sold more than 1.8 million copies in Japan.

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After seeing maiko (apprentice geishas) walking the street of Kyoto on a school trip, 16-year-old inseparable best...

Suffering from chronic insomnia that makes him irritable and distant, Ganta Nakami struggles to fit in at Kuyo High School. Assigned by his classmates to fetch a stepladder from the supposedly haunted observatory, he meets Isaki Magari, a cheerful student suffering from the same nocturnal condition as himself. Having herself spread the rumor about the near-abandoned place, Isaki invites Ganta to share her haven. However, an overly well-intentioned teacher discovers the ruse and urges them to resurrect the astronomy club if they want to keep their little paradise. On the advice of the club's former leader, the duo organizes a stargazing event, which unfortunately falls through despite the unexpected help of several other students. Devastated, Ganta believes he is the instigator of everything that goes wrong around him, but Isaki puts things into perspective by confessing a secret that haunts her day and night. A congenital illness has left her with half a heart,...

It’s hard to make food look unappetizing on screen. Fill up the screen with the greasiest monstrosity you can muster and the very fact it’s on a TV gives it a certain kind of baseline appeal. Fiction has a way of priming our stomachs in a way that even real life sometimes can’t.

In a weird way, that makes the cooking in “The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House” feel like even more of a challenge. Kore-eda Hirokazu’s new Netflix series can’t just rest on looking at some rice dishes or stews. It needs to convey the idea that Kiyo (Nana Mori), a bright-eyed teenager looking for a new life in the Gion district of Kyoto, is so entranced by the possibilities of her own food that it changes her life.

“The Makanai” finds the same magic in the everyday that’s dotted Kore-eda’s film resume.

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House (Maiko-san Chino makanai-san) is a Japanese series created by Hirokazu Koreeda starring Mayu Matsuoka, Ai Hashimoto, Nana Mori and Keiko Matsuzaka. Based on the manga by Aiko Koyama.

The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, is a tender Japanese story about art, friendship, youth, time… and, what can merge all these concepts in a single one? Food as an art form and an expression of ephemerality and at the same time, eternity, serves this series to achieve a portrayal of youth that is charming, consoling and above all, very, very tender.

About the Series The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House

A small delicacy for those that love the most traditional aspects of Japanese culture. The lives of these two kitchen apprentices will lead us, almost apologetically, to view a kind of Kyoto in which time goes by almost unnoticed, like those first...

At the close of its opening credits sequence, Netflix’s The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House splashes its title over a close-up shot of a meal. What meal specifically varies from episode to episode, depending on what the characters eat in any given one. Invariably, however, it’s some form of home-cooked comfort food: oyakodon or tomato curry or stewed eggplant, often still bubbling in the pot.

The dishes aren’t necessarily pretty, by the standards of your typical foodie show, nor do they look particularly fancy or original. But that’s precisely their appeal. They’re simple, straightforward, deceptively humble and irresistibly cozy — much like the series itself.

Adapted from the manga by Aiko Koyama, The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House centers on a rare adventure. At the start of the series, 16-year-old best friends Kiyo (an irrepressibly sunny Nana Mori) and Sumire (Natsuki Deguchi) strike out...

Cannes Palme d’Or-winning director Hirokazu Kore-eda’s first series for Netflix, The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House, is based on a best-selling manga about two young girls who move to Kyoto to start their training as ‘maiko’ or apprentice geisha.

One of them turns out to be a star maiko, but the other is not so talented in the geisha arts, which mostly comprise traditional song and dance, and ends up cooking for the household where the girls are being trained, an activity in which she excels. Neither the manga, created by Aiko Koyama, or the series are set in the Edo period, the golden era of geisha culture, but in contemporary Japan, where the profession still exists and is respected, but is also regarded as a dying art.

Scheduled to start streaming tomorrow (January 12), the series is produced by Kore-eda and Genki Kawamura, a leading producer behind hits such as Confessions,...

Emerging stars from Netflix Japan’s biggest original shows have revealed their experiences working with the streamer today at the final Tudum event of the past 24 hours.

Netflix is involved in a fierce battle for streaming supremacy in Japan with Amazon, Disney+ and others, and today’s event was a chance to show off its firepower.

As such, it held interviews with five up-and-coming stars from the Asian country at their Netflix Tudum event: Kento Yamazaki and Tao Tsuchiya, who play Arisu and Usagi from Alice in Borderland, appeared at the event alongside Nana Mori and Natsuki Deguchi, who play Kiyo and Sumire from The Makanai: Cooking for the Maiko House, and voice actress Fairouz Ai, who plays Jolyne Cujoh in the upcoming JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean.

Season one of Alice in Borderland is, based on the manga of the same name, launched in 2020, following Yamazaki and Tsuchiya...

Shoplifters director Hirokazu Kore-eda is to adapt popular comic Maiko in Kyoto: From the Maiko House into an eight-part Netflix TV series, his first for the streamer. The prolific Kore-eda teased a TV and film project for Netflix late last year and these are the first details to emerge.

Airing later this year, The Makanai: Cooking For The Maiko House from Story Inc and Bun-Buku Inc is set in the geisha district of Kyoto, as protagonist Kiyo becomes a Makanai (person who cooks meals) at a house where Maiko (apprentice geishas) live together. The story depicts the everyday life of Kiyo maiko Sumire, her childhood friend who came with her from Aomori to Kyoto, amid a vibrant world of geisha and maiko courtesans.

Kore-eda, who won the Palme d’Or in 2018 for Shoplifters, his story about a family that relies on shoplifting to cope with poverty, is also in the...

Having a great cast in his hands, Shunji Iwai decided to take a trip down his own cinematic past this time, resulting in a rather nostalgic film that works on a number of levels, but also seems to fail to pack a punch. The script is based on his own novel, while in 2018 he directed a homonymous, Chinese film starring Zhou Xun.

Yuri is a middle-aged mother who has just returned to the area she grew up, along with her daughter, Fuka, to attend the funeral of her older sister, Misaki, who has just died, leaving her own daughter, Ayumi, with her grandmother, since her husband is out of the picture. When an invitation for a class reunion comes to the house, Yuri decides to attend, to inform her sister’s classmates of her death, but finds herself being confused with Misaki, to the point that an old boyfriend of hers,...

It’s probably best not to overindulge in pre-drinks at the cinema bar before taking your seat, the lights dim and Weathering With You’s deluge of exquisite hand-drawn rain hits you square in the bladder for the next two hours. If you’re anything like me, you may feel uncomfortably twinned with Tokyo as it slowly floods in Shinkai’s simple and bright coming-of-age story overflowing with magic and charm.

We open on wayward teen Hodaka Morishima (Kotardo Daigo) on a passenger ferry sailing into Tokyo shrouded by endless rain clouds. A freak rainstorm of oceanic proportions filled with sky-fish no less, almost washes Hodaka overboard and into the arms of occult magazine writer Keisuke Suga (Shun Oguri), it’s an unlikely and yet pivotal meeting, but they soon part company after all the ramen and beer is gone. Hodaka is left to scrap it out on the capital’s rain-soaked streets avoiding policemen,...

Soaked with climate-altering passion, Makoto Shinkai’s new animated spectacle “Weathering With You” once again pits two young lovers against forces beyond their control, treading similar waters as his 2016 global hit “Your Name,” for a thrilling extravaganza of scintillating imagery, uproarious music, and gravity-defying stunts with spiritual panache.

Torrential rain drowns Tokyo like it hasn’t in recent memory, and with every enormous drop that reaches the ground, the city’s dwellers long a little harder for the sunshine of summer. Such inclement conditions welcome 15-year-old Hodaka (voiced by Kotaro Daigo), a small-town dreamer who’s run away from home to the chaotic metropolis.

Necessity propels him to take a live-in job transcribing for a scruffy father figure, Keisuke (Shun Oguri), whose occupation is to write engaging fake news. But his luck changes when he, gun in hand, attempts to defend Hina (Nana Mori), a “sunshine girl” with the power to momentarily stop the downpour.

Makoto Shinkai’s “Weathering With You,” which tells the tale of a young boy who falls for a girl with the power to stop ceaseless rainstorms pounding Tokyo, marks the first time an anime has been chosen as Japan’s foreign-language Oscar entry.

The Gkids release echoes an element of Shinkai’s previous anime, “Your Name,” a body-swapping story that was a global phenomenon, topping the box office that year in Japan and earning accolades on its way to a $358 million global haul. Nevertheless, that film earned Shinkai some controversy as well, for using a natural disaster (a comet strike) as the basis for entertainment. His follow-up invites the same criticism, an outcome the director had considered.

“I thought, ‘Should I make my next film so that I don’t anger more people, or should I make a movie that angers them further?’ And I chose the latter,” he says...

In Texas, there’s a saying that goes, “If you don’t like the weather, wait a few minutes.” All the way over in Tokyo, changing the forecast doesn’t come nearly so easy — and may even require a human sacrifice to set things right — or at least, that’s the premise of “Weathering With You,” an inventive romantic fantasy from director Makoto Shinkai, whose 2016 hit “Your Name” became the first anime made by someone other than Hayao Miyazaki to earn more than 10 billion yen (or $100 million) in Japan. Here, a young couple desperate to stay together find themselves contending with all manner of meteorological freakery, with spectacular, if somewhat difficult to follow, results.

As in the body-swapping sensation that preceded it, “Weathering With You” blends the emotional concerns of 21st-century teens with elaborate supernatural elements, making for a visually dazzling, narratively convoluted adventure that speaks to the younger generation,...

"She really was the sunshine girl!" GKids Films has debuted a final full-length official trailer (with English subtitles) for the Japanese animation film titled Weathering With You, the highly anticipated next film from writer/director Makoto Shinkai, who achieved worldwide acclaimed with the beloved animated film Your Name. This first premiered in North America at Tiff earlier this fall, now opening in Us theaters in January. Weathering with You is another original film from Shinkai, featuring some stunningly gorgeous animation. The Japanese title is actually Tenki no ko, which translates to Child of Weather, as the film is about a young man who moves to Tokyo and befriends a girl who can manipulate the weather (she has the power to stop the rain and clear the sky so the sun can shine). The original Japanese version features the voices of Kotaro Daigo & Nana Mori. It's another lovely, whimsical Japanese film that I do recommend.

After Makoto Shinkai’s Your Name. became one of the highest-grossing films in Japan’s history, the director is returning with his follow-up Weathering with You. With voice work from Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori, the story follows a lonely high school student who moves to Tokyo where he encounters dreary days and meets a girl who, due to strange circumstances, can control the weather. Set for a U.S. release early next year, a new teaser has now arrived for Japan’s Oscar entry.

Jared Mobarak said in his review from Tiff 2019, “This theme of stepping up and embracing responsibility for one’s actions permeates the entire film. Hodaka will inevitably have to face his past before figuring out what’s next. Mr. Suga will need to reconcile the pain of loss with the possibility of love. And Natsumi strives to find a place in this world as more than an afterthought.

Teenagers get plenty of flack these days with derogatory labels thrust upon them by older generations refusing to truly look outside their window at how much the world has changed. They’ve a lot to shoulder with the pressure of living up to impossible and antiquated expectations, confusion as to a future and identity they can’t quite decipher yet, and the crippling reality that the world around them is literally crumbling via war, genocide, and climate change. Kids used to run from home as a means of rebellion or cry for help, but now it’s sometimes out of necessity. Survival is staying off the grid so as not to be pushed into a damaging situation dictated by external forces that don’t understand or, worse yet, won’t listen.

What is Amano Hina (Nana Mori) supposed to do after her mother dies? Let child services take her brother...

Japan has chosen “Weathering With You” (Tenki no Ko), by record breaking director Makoto Shinkai as national entry for the Best International Feature Film Category at the 2020 Oscars.

“Weathering With You” – that has just reached the $100 million (10.7 billion yen) mark at the domestic box office – is the first anime, since ‘Princess Mononoke’ by Hayao Miyazaki in 1998, to be designated to represent Japan at the Academy Awards.

The two protagonists are voiced by Kotaro Daigo (Hodaka) e da Nana Mori (Hina), and the theme-song “Ai ni Deikiru Koto wa Mada Aru Kai” is composed by popular j-rock band Radwimps that had greatly contributed to the success of “Your Name”.

Other members of the crew include Masayoshi Tanaka (“Your Name”) in charge of the character design, Atsushi Tamura head of animation, and artistic director Hiroshi Takiguchi (“The Garden of Words”, “Ajin”).

Synopsis

Hodaka Morishima runs away from his remote island to Tokyo,...

“Weathering With You” (Tenki no Ko) is a fable about friensdhip and climate, written and diected by acclaimed director Makoto Shinkai (“Your Name”. “The Garden of Words”, “Journey to Aghartha”, “5 Centimeters per Second”)

Produced by CoMix Wave (same studio behind “Your Name” and “Flavors of Youth”) the film premiered in Japanese Cinemas on the 19th of July and it’s already a huge hit.

The two protagonists are voiced by Kotaro Daigo (Hodaka) e da Nana Mori (Hina), and the them song “Ai ni Deikiru Koto wa Mada Aru Kai” is composed by popular j-rock band Radwimps that had greatly contributed to the success of “Your Name”.

Other members of the crew include Masayoshi Tanaka (“Your Name”) in charge of the character design, Atsushi Tamura head of animation, and artistic director Hiroshi Takiguchi (“The Garden of Words”, “Ajin”).

Considering the well-known passion and ability for weather rapresentation that director...

"I didn't know there were so many people longing for the blue sky." GKids has just released a brand new, official Us trailer (with English subtitles) for the Japanese animation film titled Weathering With You, the highly anticipated next film from writer/director Makoto Shinkai, who achieved worldwide acclaimed with the beloved animated film Your Name. Weathering with You is another new original film from Shinkai, featuring some stunningly gorgeous animation. The Japanese title is actually Tenki no ko, which translates to Child of Weather, as the film is about a young man who moves to Tokyo and befriends a girl who can manipulate the weather (with the power to stop the rain and clear the sky). The original Japanese version features the voices of Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori. This is officially set to premiere at the Toronto Film Festival before getting a theatrical release later. The animation in this is stunning,...

How do you follow a highly acclaimed, high-grossing film such as Your Name (2016) ? The answer by director and writer Shinkai Makoto will be unfurled in Japan very shortly: Weathering With You. In December 2018, we heard more about the film from Variety: "Set in a world where the weather is out of whack, the film tells the story of a boy who runs away from home to Tokyo where he meets a psychically super-powered girl who has the ability to make the skies blue. Newcomers Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori will voice the male and female leads, respectively. "In a statement Shinkai said that he decided on weather as a theme since...

[Read the whole post on screenanarchy.com...]...

"This is a story about the world's secrets that only me and her know..." Toho Co. has unveiled an official trailer for the Japanese animation film titled Weathering with You, the highly anticipated next film from writer/director Makoto Shinkai, who achieved worldwide acclaimed with the beloved animated film Your Name. Weathering with You is another new original film from Shinkai, featuring some stunningly gorgeous animation. The Japanese title is actually Tenki no ko, which translates to Child of Weather, as the film is about a young man who moves to Tokyo and befriends a girl who can manipulate the weather (the power to stop the rain and clear the sky). The original Japanese version features the voices of Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori. This is one of those exhilarating trailers where you don't even need subtitles or translation, the animation speaks for itself. And I won't deny that I'm...

Weathering With You Trailer Makoto Shinkai‘s Weathering With You (2019) teaser trailer stars Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori. Weathering With You‘s plot synopsis: the film “follows a high school student named Hodaka “who leaves his island home and moves to Tokyo. He’s immediately broke from the move and lives his life in isolation, but soon finds [...]

Continue reading: Weathering With You (2019) Teaser Trailer: A Visual Feast from Your Name’s director Makoto Shinkai...

Bested only by Spirited Away, Titanic, and Frozen, Makoto Shinkai’s 2006 anime Your Name. is one of the highest-grossing films in Japan’s history and now the director is returning three years later with his follow-up. Titled Weathering with You, the first international trailer has arrived and while no subtitles are available yet, we do get a look at the beautiful visuals.

With voice work from Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori, the story follows a lonely high school student who moves to Tokyo where he encounters dreary days and meets a girl who, due to strange circumstances, can control the weather. Set for a release this July in Japan, hopefully the film makes its way to the states soon after. In related news, Marc Webb was recently set to direct a J.J. Abrams-produced remake of Your Name. written by Eric Heisserer (Arrival).

Check out the trailer and poster below.

Three years after the animation “Your Name” began its long triumphant reign over the Japanese and international box office, its director Makoto Shinkai has announced his next animated feature. Titled “Weathering With You,” the film will arrive in theaters in Japan on July 19 of next year, with Toho distributing.

Set in a world where the weather is out of whack, the film tells the story of a boy who runs away from home to Tokyo where he meets a psychically super-powered girl who has the ability to make the skies blue. Newcomers Kotaro Daigo and Nana Mori will voice the male and female leads, respectively.

In a statement Shinkai said that he decided on weather as a theme since it is something “we ourselves worry about. Even though the sky is so distant.”

Shinkai’s fantasy romance “Your Name” was released in 2016. It earned a global total of $358 million, a record for a Japanese film.

Tony Sokol Feb 25, 2019

Hungry dead things come back to life in sequel to live action adaptation of anime series Tokyo Ghoul.

The Tokyo Ghoul live-action sequel is coming to life as the film's official Twitter confirmed a July 19 release date and new casting and. Nana Mori will play Yuriko Kosaka, who was played by Seika Furuhata in the 2017 live action adaption. Mai Kiryu joins the cast as Kimi Nishino. Distributor Shochiku has not yet released an official title for the sequel, which is tentatively being called Tokyo Ghoul 2.

Directed by Kentarō Hagiwara, the live-action Tokyo Ghoul film was released in Japan on July 29, 2017. It had its world premiere during Anime Expo 2017, and had a limited theatrical run from Funimation, which licensed the film for a Blu-ray and DVD release. Tokyo Ghoul starred Masataka Kubota as protagonist, Ken Kaneki, the first half-human, half-ghoul hybrid. Fumika Shimizu was the heroine, Tōka Kirishima.