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1st Anpanman Film After Creator's Passing to Open on July 5

The staff and cast of the Anpanman anime announced on Thursday that the first film after Anpanman creator Takashi Yanase's passing will open on July 5. The new film is titled Soreike! Anpanman: Ringo Bōya to Minna no Negai (Let's Go! Anpanman: The Apple Boy and Everyone's Wishes). NTV producer Toshio Nakatani also confirmed that the Anpanman television anime will continue.

Yanase passed away in October, and Thursday, February 6 would have been his 95th birthday. The staff and cast marked the occasion with a "Thank You! Takashi Yanase-sensei's Happy 95th Birthday" event in Tokyo.

They presented a message and sketch (pictured right) that Yanase had penned in September for the new film. Yanase wrote in the message about what had inspired him to conceive this film sometime before last summer:

I was moved by what a series of articles in a newspaper reported. Some villagers were trying to make their small village change, shifting to stock farming. Just when they got on track with the changes, the Great East Japan Earthquake occurred, and the accident at the nuclear power plant happened. The villagers left their village, contaminated with the radioactivity, and dispersed. However, they did not give in to these hardships, and are trying to rebuild their beloved homeland again.

Inspired by this, I made nostalgia and the reconstruction of a homeland as the themes of this new film. I chose the symbol of an apple since the visual is beautiful. Also, in northeastern Japan, there are many apple farmers. "Ringo Bōya" (Apple Boy) comes back to his homeland to restore it into a beautiful apple village!

Sources: Oricon, Mainichi Shimbun's Mantan Web

Images © Takashi Yanase
© Takashi Yanase/Froebel-kan Co., Ltd., TMS, NTV