News

Shoji Kawamori Designs Eureka Seven's Largest Nirvash for 2nd Film

The official Twitter account for the Eureka Seven: Hi - Evolution film trilogy revealed the designs for the "Nirvash X" mecha on Thursday. The mecha will appear in Anemone: Kōkyōshihen Eureka Seven Hi-Evolution (Anemone: Eureka Seven: Hi - Evolution), the second film in the Eureka Seven: Hi - Evolution film trilogy. Shōji Kawamori (Macross, Last Hope) designed this new version of the franchise's main mecha, and it is the largest of its kind in the franchise's history.

The film will open in Japan on November 10.

For the first time in the Eureka Seven franchise, the film will be set in Tokyo. The film centers on Anemone, a girl who lost her father in a battle in Toyko seven years prior to the film's story, leaving her with only her stuffed toy Gulliver, and the AI concierge Dominikids for emotional support. Now she is a key part of a strategy by the experimental unit "Acid" to combat the seventh Eureka, "Eureka Seven," an enemy of humanity that has killed 2.6 billion people. Driven to the brink, all of humanity entrusts its hope to Anemone as she dives deep into the interior of Eureka Seven.

The staff remains mostly the same as the first film, but adds Takuhito Kusanagi and Fumihiro Katagai as designers. Shigeru Fujita and Ayumi Kurashima remain credited as character animation director, but are now also credited as sub-character designers. Kenta Yokoya is now credited as mechanical animation director and design works, while previous mechanical animation director Shingo Abe is now credited as one of the main animators, alongside Hideki Kakita, Shuichi Kaneko, Ken Ootsuka, and Nobuaki Nagano.

The first film in the trilogy opened on 107 screens in Japan last September, after making its worldwide debut at Otakon last August. In its first two days, it raised about 63 million yen (about US$561,137). Funimation screened the film in theaters in the United States on February 5 and 7, with screenings in Japanese with English subtitles, and with an English dub.

The first film showed more of The First Summer of Love phenomenon that occurred a decade before the first Eureka Seven series. Before the first film debuted, the anime franchise thus far has hinted at, but never depicted in full, "the beginning of it all." The films then have the same basic story as the first Eureka Seven series, but will have an original ending. The trilogy has completely re-recorded lines, redone footage, and new scenes.

The third film is slated to open in 2019.

For the Japanese version of the first film, Yūko Sanpei, Kaori Nazuka, Kouji Tsujitani, Michiko Neya, Juurouta Kosugi, and Aya Hisakawa all returned from the original anime as their characters Renton, Eureka, Dewey, Talho, Charles, and Ray, respectively. Toshiyuki Morikawa played Holland, replacing Keiji Fujiwara from the original television anime. Tohru Furuya played Renton's father Adrock Thurston.

Sources: Eureka Seven: Hi - Evolution anime's official Twitter account, Anime! Anime! (Kōtarō Nakase)