Sub-titled The Adult Empire Strikes Back, the timing and content of this movie couldn’t have been more appropriate. Like clockwork, they’re released on the exact same weekend every year, and normally people think of them as nothing more than “more Shin-chan.” But this time, it was different. To date, there have been 18 such movies this one was the 9 th. But the year 2001 may have given us the best example: that year’s Crayon Shin-chan movie. In the year 2000 the fact that Digimon: Our War Game was far more than it needed to be surprised everyone, though you might be less surprised in 2010 now that its director Mamoru Hosoda has since made both The Girl Who Leapt through Time and the aforementioned Summer Wars. That’s why you get completely blindsided when a movie of this type ends up being amazing. You might say they’re done-in-one “filler” tales, and indeed they tend to play out like extended TV episodes with higher budgets.
As such, nothing can really happen in these movies to affect anything in the long term whatsoever.
They tend to be self-contained stories that lie completely separate from the timeline of the series itself a necessity, considering that a far greater audience of kids will be able to watch an anime series for free on television than pay money to see it in theaters. Chances are good that you’ve seen at least one of these sorts of movies at some point. Most of these movies never come out in America, unless the show in question is already a big hit. If you look at the full listing of anime movies released in a given year, the majority of them are theatrical installments of TV properties popular in Japan at the time. So far, neither of those films has been licensed for US release.īut technically speaking, there are still decent amounts of box office Japanese animation being created. Theatrical anime movies don’t come out in America very often anymore, and perhaps that’s part of why they don’t really get made as much anymore compared to how things were “back in the day.” Movies require more time and money to create than television shows after all, though I must confess that when I think of “anime movies,” I’m thinking of unique intellectual properties that aren’t tied in to a previously existing anime such as Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars or Takeshi Koike’s Redline.