The Boy and the Beast

Mamoru Hosoda started the project in September 2012, just after his previous film Wolf Children reached cinemas. Story development took about 13 months, the screenplay about 4 months from October 2013, the storyboards 8 months from March 2014; drawing ran from May 2014 to May 2015. The team behind it changed too. Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, who had designed the characters from The Girl Who Leapt Through Time to Wolf Children, was replaced by three: Hosoda, the animation director Takaaki Yamashita and the stylist Daisuke Iga, who also did the film’s costumes. Satoko Okudera, writer of the earlier features, moved to a screenplay cooperation credit, leaving one name. After youth, extended family and the mother child bond, Hosoda picked fathers and sons here, moving the adventure from the countryside into the middle of Shibuya. It opened on 457 screens in Japan, sold 494,170 tickets in its first weekend and passed 4 million admissions in 45 days. It left the San Sebastián competition empty handed, then won animation of the year at the 39th Japan Academy Film Prize on 4 March 2016. A good fit if you want fight training that begins in imitation, the boy learning by copying his master through household chores. Not for anyone who will find the whale shaped abstraction of the closing cut off from the story.