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Please Teacher! Gets Crowdfunding Campaign for New Animation Video

Production company Genco, Inc. launched a crowdfunding campaign on the Motion Gallery website on Thursday to fund a new animation video project for the Please Teacher! romantic comedy anime franchise. The campaign aims to raise 25,000,000 yen (about US$160,000), and will end on March 28, 2026. The announcement of the campaign notes that it is a "reboot" of the "Onegai" series.

The new animation video is planned to begin production in December, and is projected to finish around April or May 2026. The video is planned to have limited screenings in Tokyo and the Lake Kizaki area in Nagano, the setting of both anime. The video is also planned to have a Blu-ray Disc release.

Yasunori Ide, the director of both Please Teacher! and Please Twins, returns to direct the new video at Studio M2, with series character designer Taraku Uon returning for the original character designs. Kusanagi is handling the background art. Emi Yonezawa is the producer. Bandai Namco Filmworks is producing the Blu-ray Disc. GENCO is credited for production. Atsuko Nakajima, who key animated the ending credits sequence and the 13th episode of Please Teacher!, will draw an illustration for the project.

The romantic comedy anime series Please Teacher! and Please Twins debuted in 2001 and 2003, respectively. Both were directed by Yasunori Ide, with scripts by Yōsuke Kuroda, original character designs by Taraku Uon, and animation character designs by Hiroaki Gōda. Daume animated both works. Both anime tell high school romance stories in the Lake Kizaki area. Bandai Entertainment previously released both anime in English on DVD, and Nozomi Entertainment released both on DVD in 2015, and later on Blu-ray Disc in 2019.

The series spawned a spiritual successor anime, Waiting in the Summer, in 2012. Though Kuroda returned for scripts and Uon returned for the original character designs, Tatsuyuki Nagai instead directed the anime, with Masayoshi Tanaka, now most well known for his character designs for Makoto Shinkai's latest three films, drawing the animation character designs. Though not set in the Lake Kizaki area, the lake maintains a strong thematic importance in the anime. Sentai Filmworks licensed the anime, and streamed it on Crunchyroll, and later released it on DVD and Blu-ray Disc.

Sources: Motion Gallery, GENCO's X/Twitter account via Otakomu