Pretending to forget

Suzu is a quiet and ordinary -- if not a bit of clumsy and daydreaming -- girl growing up in the outskirts of the city of Hiroshima in mid-1930s. She loves drawing sketches with pencils -- a hobby she is really good at. Following her parents' arrangement in 1943, 18-year-old Suzu is married to a young man living in Kure, a neighboring city with a large naval base, in which he works as a civilian secretary for the military tribunal. There she faces a new life, a new family, as well as many new challenges and hardships, particularly with the worsening life conditions due to the Pacific War. Yet Suzu manages to find happiness and peace in her daily life. The concept behind the film is to give the perspective of "several more lives" in addition to Suzu's, so it has a new title to reflect the new theme. It will adapt more scenes from the manga. The new scenes include Suzu crossing paths with Rin in the fall of 1944 and the winter and spring of 1945. Rin features prominently in the new visual above and the video below. Another new segment will focus on the Makurazaki Typhoon of September 1945, while Suzu is worried for her younger sister Sumi.

A movie by The Tohoku Regional Development Association which was made in order to raise earthquake awareness. The anime consists of two parts titled "Sonaeru" (Prepare) and "Manabu" (Learn), focusing on true stories from Iwate prefecture's Fudai village and Kamaishi City. "Sonaeru" is set during the 1970s to 1980s, and focuses on the story of Kotoku Wamura, the mayor of the village Fudai at the time, as he attempts to persuade the village assembly that his proposed floodgate and seawall project is not useless. He remembers the 1896 and 1933 Sanriku earthquakes and tsunamis in proposing the project. The 15.5-meter (51-foot) floodgate — the highest in the Tohoku region — ends up sparing Fudai the damage that the 2011 tsunami subjected other coastal towns. "Manabu" centers on elementary school children in Kamaishi City during the 2011 disaster, illustrating their lessons learned in disaster readiness to head to higher ground. The story will show "Tsunami Tendenko," a local custom telling people to individually seek higher ground on their own initiative, in a lesson that the children would teach their parents.

Ordinary life repeats itself every day. The succession of moments that we repeat over and over again is never the same, and everything changes and wavers. The moment we touch something, our consciousness can go to a place that does not exist anywhere in the past, nor in the future. In an uncertain and fluctuating world, only the feeling of the body touching something, which exists only in this present reality, can be recognized as “now”. That moment is lovely. Note: Premiered at the 75th Berlin International Film Festival on February 15, 2025

A concept movie animated by FLAT STUDIO for the All Nippon Esthetic Association (AEA). The friendship between "Saki" who aims to be an esthetician and "Umi" who aims to be a model expresses that "by being close to a person, you can change that person little by little and eventually change the world."