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Mamoru Hosoda's The Boy and the Beast Film Plays in Beverly Hills, California

Laemmle's Music Hall theater began screening The Boy and The Beast, the latest film from director Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children), on Friday in Beverly Hills, California. The film will continue playing with English subtitles several times a day until at least next Thursday.

The Boy and The Beast has been submitted for the Best Animated Feature Oscar, and it has also been nominated for the new "Best Animated Feature-Independent" category of the 43rd annual Annie Awards. To qualify for consideration in the 88th Academy Awards, a feature film must play in a commercial movie theater in Los Angeles County for at least seven straight days by December 31, 2015.

The story of The Boy and The Beast is set in the human realm (Tokyo's Shibuya ward) and the bakemono realm ("Jūtengai"). In these two worlds that 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 created and scripted the movie. The film is Hosoda's first film since 2012, when his relatively new animation movie company Studio Chizu released Wolf Children as its first project. Masakatsu Takagi (Wolf Children) is scoring the soundtrack.

The film debuted at #1 in the Japanese box-office on July 11 and earned 667,035,100 yen (about US$5.4 million) in its first two days. It eventually surpassed the total box office earnings of Hosoda's previous film, Wolf Children.

Funimation licensed the American rights to the film, and plans to release the film nationwide in early 2016. Theatrical screenings have also been set for France, and the major French movie studio Gaumont will handle international sales outside Asia. Funimation is working with Gaumont International to release the film. The Fantasic Film Festival in Austin hosted the U.S. premiere, and Madman Entertainment is hosting both the Australian release and an English-subitled trailer:

Thanks to getmorerw for the news tip