Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid: A lonely dragon wants to be loved

Produced by Kyoto Animation, this anime feature opens when Kanna's father, leader of the Chaos faction, appears without warning and demands she return to the Dragon World, regarding her not as a daughter but as a dragon to be used in a coming war. Kobayashi refuses to hand her over, a correspondence begins between father and daughter, and the real antagonist turns out to be a human sorcerer inciting the two factions against each other. The most meaningful detail in the credits is not technical: Yasuhiro Takemoto, who directed the series' first season, was among the thirty six staff killed in the 2019 Kyoto Animation arson attack, and he receives a posthumous series director credit here, as he did on the second season. Another pleasing detail sits in the voice cast: the legendary enka singer Sachiko Kobayashi voices a dragon and noted it was the first time in a sixty one year career she had played one, and she performs the closing theme as well. The film opened on two hundred screens in Japan and crossed four hundred million yen, ranking among the year's higher grossing anime features. Who it's for: Followers of the series and admirers of Kyoto Animation's craft. Who it's not for: Not for newcomers, since as one critic noted its dense continuity is hard going without the earlier shows.