Columnist Andrew Osmond assesses the new film, now streaming on Crunchyroll, and backlist by one of anime’s most prolific writers.
Anime fans often follow particular studios and directors; some dig deeper to prioritize their favorite animators. But how about writers? It’s complicated by how some of the most famous anime, especially films, are written by their directors, as with the works of Miyazaki and Shinkai. In many cases, fans highlight the writers of the source manga or “light novels” over the people who adapted them to anime.
In previous columns, I’ve mentioned a couple of prolific adapters: Jukki Hanada (Steins;Gate, Sound Euphonium!) and Hiroshi Seko (Chainsaw Man, Dan Da Dan, Jujutsu Kaisen, most of Attack on Titan). More fan attention, though, goes to a writer of original storylines, Gen Urobuchi, famed for the dark brutality of Puella Magi Madoka Magica and the original Psycho-Pass.
Of course, even when the story’s original, TV writing is a deeply collaborative process. I’ve raved over A Place Further Than The Universe, an original story whose credited writer was Hanada, though it’s very likely that director Atsuko Ishizuka and other staff had a large hand in the narrative. For older fans, one of the most celebrated writer-director partnerships was that between Kazunori Ito and director Mamoru Oshii on the first two Patlabor films, followed by Ghost in the Shell, though they broke up soon after.
In an industry whose directors are overwhelmingly male, women often make themselves known as writers. Keiko Nobumoto wrote Macross Plus, Tokyo Godfathers, Wolf’s Rain and much of Cowboy Bebop, before her tragically early death in 2021, aged 57. Satoko Okudera scripted three Mamoru Hosoda films (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars and Wolf Children). One likely rising star is Kimiko Ueno (my interview), whose work in the last year included the excellent adaptation of Sanda and the original story Zenshu.
Then there’s Reiko Yoshida, an industry powerhouse. She’s best-known for her collaborations with director Naoko Yamada from the TV K-ON!, through the films A Silent Voice and Liz and the Blue Bird, up to 2024’s The Colors Within. She’s also written outstanding titles away from Yamada, including the film Okko’s Inn and much of the series adaptations of Violet Evergarden and Dead Dead Demon’s Dededede Destruction.
And then there’s Mari Okada.
This hedgehog is a god
Okada’s new feature film has just dropped onto Crunchyroll. Fureru is a self-contained story, though its themes have more resonances if you’ve seen some of Okada’s copious past work. It’s directed by Tatsuyuki Nagai, who has collaborated with Okada several times over the years. Fureru’s studio is CloverWorks, whose past titles include the teen romcom My Dress-Up Darling. The studio is a rebranded offshoot of A-1, which animated Okada and Nagai’s landmark 2013 series Anohana, which I’ll get to later.
Fureru lays out its fantastical premise in its first minutes, though much of the main story is more grounded. On a Japanese island, a local boy, Aki, finds a shrine in a cave by the sea. Within is a small creature looking like a bright-eyed yellow hedgehog. Unlike the title character in last year’s disturbing Takopi’s Original Sin, this critter isn’t incongruously cartoony. It never speaks, and a non-zoologist might assume it’s a rare but natural creature. But it’s soon clear that it’s the island’s fabled deity, the title Fureru, which brings people together.
Aki brings Fureru to his elementary school, where he has an altercation with two boys in his class, Ryo and Yuta. The creature expands and envelops the trio… and the boys are suddenly best friends, inseparable, treasuring Fureru as their shared secret.
The main film follows the trio, now young adults, to Tokyo, still keeping Fureru close. They move into a shared house, finding work or training – Aki gets employment at a small bar. They stop a thief who’s snatched a bag from a girl their age, Nana. In short order, the boys are sharing their house and rent with Nana and her friend Jun.
By now, we’ve been shown the boys are telepathic, if only among themselves. When they touch hands, they share each other’s thoughts. This makes Fureru a throwback. Telepathic youngsters were a trope of science-fiction in Japan in the 1970s – an American author who was popular in Japan was Alexander Key, who wrote the Disney-adapted Escape to Witch Mountain. On the other hand, Fureru adds a funny modern spin. The girl Jun notices that Aki and Ryo are touching hands, and at once she becomes very happy with the idea of moving in with them. After all, she reasons, they won’t bother girls.
Fureru is an unusual animated film, though less unusual in anime. Its expensive production renders Tokyo in intensely punctilious detail. Yet it often feels analogous to an intentionally small live-action character drama, something rare in American feature animation outside Anomolisa. Although one of the girls has a menacing male stalker on her trail, that strand is underplayed. Instead, the biggest shock is when two of the “nice” characters make blithe comments that’d appall any normal adult, shattering the film’s coziness. Given the scenario’s retro feel, it might be an implicit comment on the attitudes you could find in an “innocent” book from your childhood.
The story, though, has trouble getting started, and I struggled to connect in the film’s opening scenes. Perhaps it should have begun with the boys and girls meeting in Tokyo, then parceled out the boys’ history in a flashback. The later scenes leave the careful daily-life realism behind and go into rather rote fantasy fare, without ramping up the animation enough to take us along. Some of the character movement in these scenes is substandard, turning the film into a cut-price imitation of a “real” fantasy spectacle, rather than the impressively low-key drama of the middle scenes.
Fureru’s central fable about empathy, friendship and the limits of connection, is ingenious, but the ending’s emotions fail to connect. Still, I found Fureru worthwhile, especially in its “mundane” scenes of people living in close quarters in a shared Tokyo building. (A beloved 1980s anime sitcom, Maison Ikkoku, milked that set-up over dozens of episodes.) You can experience that lifestyle all over the world, but I was especially reminded of the Japanese sharehouses I’ve used in the country, and the people I met in them.
Two notes: Shizuoka prefecture is about 150 kilometers from Tokyo, which becomes relevant during the story. For anyone wondering about the tramline depicted in the film, it’s Tokyo’s Toden Arakawa line.
Okada’s “Chichibu” anime
Fureru’s writer Mari Okada is one of the few anime professionals outside Ghibli to have a career memoir available in English. Available on Kindle, it’s called “From Truant to Anime Screenwriter: My Path to Anohana and Anthem of the Heart.” It’s an unsparingly frank account of Okada’s difficult early life, when she was driven to skip school for five and a half years.
Okada’s account of her painful troubles connecting with other people as a child, a teen and sometimes even as an adult, give an underpinning for Fureru. The film is told through the eyes of the boy Aki, who has his own troubles connecting to anyone till he meets Fureru. At first that’s a wish-fulfilling fantasy for a lonely child, till later scenes bring up all the complications.
You can also see Fureru as a companion to one of the many TV anime series Okada wrote, Kiznaiver (available on Crunchyroll) in 2016. It’s about seven teens who get involved in an experiment which makes them feel each other’s pain, though it’s far broader than Fureru in its humor and bright-colored designs. For all the show’s stereotypes and story holes, its tormented teens are hugely enjoyable, with the heartfelt ending Fureru lacks. I wrote more on it here.
Kiznaiver, though, isn’t generally seen as a defining Okada anime. One of the first of those was Anohana in 2013, set in the rural town of Chichibu where Okada grew up. Indeed, the protagonist’s house is directly modelled on her childhood home, where her mother was still living. In her “From Truant to Anime Screenwriter” book, Okada gives a characteristically blunt account of her relationship with her mother – her dad wasn’t in the picture – and the pain that each of them caused the other.
Okada also describes her shock when the production team decided to set Anohana in Chichibu, rather than in a fictional town like Chichibu. She was even more shocked when the artists, who visited Okada’s mother during their research trip, turned her house into the home of Anohana’s character Jintan. Okada describes how she frantically rejected multiple background designs by the art team, but the house stayed stubbornly recognizable.
Like the young Okada, Anohana’s Jintan is confined to his house when we first meet him. His self-imposed confinement is linked to a years-old trauma – the death of a child playmate, a girl called Menma. The story starts with Menma appearing beside Jintan, ready to play with him like she always did. Jintan insists she’s an illusion, but he soon finds himself leaving his house and trying to link with his other old acquaintances. But all the teens hide secret shames, resentments and attractions, hashed up together. Menma may be a ghost, but what haunts her friends is angrier and gnarlier.
Watched today, Anohana feels like a precursor to a non-Okada film, A Silent Voice, which is also about teens troubled by childhood memories, centered on an innocent girl. Beyond that, Anohana is a wonderful story of fraught love polygons, dynamited character dynamics, and fascinating support characters who you can easily root for more than the leads. One uproarious scene has Jintan trying to save a friend’s reputation from lewd gossip, only to spread embarrassment around him like smoke. The ending may seem like too much of an emotional wallow even for anime, but we like the characters too much to begrudge them one more catharsis.
Like Fureru, Anohana was directed by Tatsuyaki Nagai. He and Okada also teamed on two other cinema feature films: 2015’s Anthem of the Heart, on Prime Video, and 2019’s Her Blue Sky, on Netflix. They’re both excellent, and frankly much better than Fureru. They’re entirely separate stories, but they both use Chichibu as the setting. One more link between the “Chichibu” anime and Fureru is Masayoshi Tanaka, who works on these titles as the Character Designer and Animation Director. Tanaka also designed the characters for Makoto Shinkai’s blockbusters from Your Name onwards.
Animated by the P.A. Works studio, Anthem of the Heart took me a second viewing to appreciate fully. At first it seems a hackneyed teen drama about girl with emotional problems, helped by a bland-seeming schoolboy who turns her life around. But while Anthem doesn’t exactly subvert this template, it feeds in story and character elements that make things complex and satisfying. Four high-schoolers – two girls, two boys – are unwillingly roped into creating a musical performance. One girl has a chronic fear of speaking, and is convinced she’s cursed, by no less than a demon egg. While almost certainly a fantasy, the fantasy controls her.
However, the girl finds that even when she can’t speak, she can still sing. It’s funny to see an animated film about the principles behind musicals, given so many Western cartoon films – and so few anime - are musicals. The film’s finale uses two famous non-Japanese tunes to gorgeous effect.
True, it’s easy to take offence at the ending, which tweaks expectations in a way that can feel superficial and sexist. Yet the feelings conveyed are more real than standard teen melodrama. The film often feels like that melodrama, even risibly so, yet with many truthful touches. The moments of beautifully delicate character animation are echoed in the script’s working out of knotty emotions.
The 2019 film Her Blue Sky is also a delight. Animated by Cloverworks, it’s about another Chichibu girl, another seeming Okada stand-in. She’s being eaten up by both frustration and guilt when she meets a ghost – a teen boy guitarist about her age, whom she knew as a child in an irrecoverable past. Unlike Anohana, though, this is the ghost of someone still living, and soon the adult version of the guitarist, sullen and jaded, turns up as well. Things get more complicated because the guitarist is smitten by the girl’s older sister, but the younger girl is old enough to be drawn to the teenage ghost herself. It’s the kind of uncomfortable twist Okada loves.
Okada the Director
You also find such twists in the two anime feature films which Okada has written and directed herself, one well-known, the other more obscure. The better-known one is Maquia: When The Promised Flower Blooms. It was released in 2018, animated by P.A. Works, and can be found on Crunchyroll. It’s set in a fantasy world of immortal elves and hulking dragons. The titular Maquia is an elf figure, called a Iorph. She’s a young girl but will continue to look as young for centuries to come. Then the Iorphs’ home is raided by men who want to steal the tribe’s longevity through rape, forcing the Iorph women to bear half-human children.
Maquia escapes; lost in the human world, she finds an orphaned human baby, and flounders around trying to care for it, until a kind human woman and her children take them in. As the years pass, the baby, called Ariel, grows up and so does Maquia in a way, acting far more like an adult. But she doesn’t age, and by the time Ariel’s a teenager, still living with this slip of a girl, he’s had enough of being a mother’s boy.
In exploring both characters’ painful confusions, Maquia subverts the coming-of-age story. The film takes the Oedipal themes that seemed unworkable in anime after Evangelion, except as punchlines, and makes them disturbing again. There’s a subplot about Maquia’s friend Leilia that is even more darkly subversive, as she’s taken by humans and plunged into an appalling tragedy that’s cruelly scripted for her by men, and not just human ones.
I found Maquia’s drawing often indifferent or awkward. Even a spectacular action set-piece, involving a dragon’s pursuit of Maquia created by a star animator, felt ungainly and ugly to me. The end involves a heart-stopping juxtaposition of battle and birth, only to lose its nerve. Still Maquia’s story ideas feel both “obvious” – why haven’t more fantasy works explored them? - and fresh, the film using the furniture of epic fantasy to craft something exquisitely intimate. A current anime hit, Frieren: Beyond Jouney’s End, seemingly owes Maquia a large debt.
Okada went on to direct the less discussed Maboroshi, a lavish feature film released on Netflix in 2024, animated by the MAPPA studio. MAPPA beautifully realizes a rural industrial town (not Chichibu), dominated by a monstrous factory like a sleeping dragon. The town is magically cut off from the rest of the world, where no-one ages and moral guardians encourage people not to change for their salvation.
The story takes a long time to convince. Far more than Fureru, its direction is unclear for a long time; the really interesting ideas don’t emerge till the film’s second half. The principals are mostly teens, but their adversary is terribly annoying, a ranting quack priest whose screen time is never justified. But Okada fans will appreciate her usual flair for tortured teen feelings, an angry mother-child drama (the child’s a capering little girl, brilliantly drawn) and provocative themes, including an almost parodically uncomfortable love rivalry. It culminates splendidly, with a rousing statement like a teenage It’s a Wonderful Life and a terrific firework-strewn chase finale.
The rest of the iceberg
I’ve mostly focused on Okada’s more obvious “signature” work, but any fan knows it’s a tiny selection of her output. There’s much I’ve still not seen – by all accounts, one of her most important series is Hanasaku Iroha on Crunchyroll, about a girl working at a country onsen hot spring. But I did enjoy P.A. Works’ 2013 series A Lull in the Sea, also on Crunchyroll (video above). It’s a fantasy about the relationship between the people of the land and those who visit them from under the sea. The first half is charming but emotionally hit and miss, with real, complex moments alternating with oversold melodrama. But then the story takes a big change in direction at the midway point (much like Steins;Gate), after which many of Okada’s favorite themes recur.
Then there’s the very different O Maidens in Your Savage Season, animated in 2019 by the Lay-duce studio and available on Prime Video. It has the distinction of not just being written by Okada, but adapted from her own manga strip. Like America’s Big Mouth, Maidens explores the sexual thoughts of adolescents, primarily girls. The main thread shows a girl’s increasingly confused feelings for the increasingly handsome boy neighbor she’s known from infancy. He used to be obsessed with trains, but now he thinks about sex too, as the girl discovers in the worst way imaginable.
The early episodes are both hilarious and charming, though as the show turns heavy and sometimes creepy, the melodrama detaches from believability. The last episode is full-on ludicrous – though thankfully, it also brings back the laughs.
Okada also wrote the 2012 series Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, which I mentioned in my column on Takeshi Koike, and the likeable 2020 feline fantasy film A Whisker Away which I reviewed here. But my last recommendation goes to Toradora!, a delightful romcom from 2008 which you can still see on Prime Video. It’s about the relationship between a schoolboy cursed with hard-man looks and a girl who’s a little fireball; their crises earn laughs and tears amid silliness and high melodrama. The series also united the future “Chichibu” trio of director Tatsuyuki Nagai, Animation Director Masayoshi Tanaka and Okada as writer. Here’s what it looks like:
