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Summer Wars' Mamoru Hosoda Makes 1st New Film in 3 Years

Bakemono no Ko (The Boy and The Beast), the latest film from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and Summer Wars director Mamoru Hosoda, will open in Japan on July 11, 2015. It will be his first film since 2012, when his relatively new animation movie company Studio Chizu released Wolf Children as its first project.

In a Tokyo press conference, Hosoda talked about the new project: "The movie is a training story about a boy who was separated from his parents and becomes a disciple of a bakemono (supernatural creature). It's going to be a traditional yet novel story."

The story is set in the human realm (Tokyo's Shibuya ward) and the bakemono realm ("Jūtengai"). In these two worlds which must not intersect, there lives a lonely boy and a lonely bakemono. One day, the boy gets lost in the bakemono world, becomes the disciple of the bakemono Kumatetsu, and is renamed Kyūta.

Hosoda explained that he set the movie in Shibuya since he "thought that there are thrilling things hidden in this town of adventure." He added, "There are surprisingly few animated works set in Shibuya. Even though it's a famous place, it'll be novel as a movie setting."

The tagline on the movie's poster reads, "A new action adventure flick." Hosoda's previous films depicted various relationships, such those between mother and child or relatives, and he commented that this movie's theme is, "Are they going to be father and son…?" He said that he is still thinking about how to cast the film, since "there's lots of ojisan (older guys)."

Hosoda created and scripted the movie, and plans to complete it next June. Theatrical screenings have already been set for France, and the major French movie studio Gaumont will handle international sales outside Asia. General producer Seiji Okuda (Summer Wars, Wolf Children) of NTV (who is producing the movie), NTV's movie division head Daisuke Kadoya, and Studio Chizu producer Yuichiro Saito (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children) attended the press conference.

Source: Oricon