A New Dawn

Released on March 6, 2026, A New Dawn is a 76-minute co-production between Japan and France.

It was distributed by Asmik Ace and produced by A NEW DAWN Film Partners.

The film stars Riku Hagiwara, Kotone Furukawa, Miyu Irino, and Takashi Okabe.

Its music was composed by Shuta Hasunuma.

The story follows two childhood friends at a struggling fireworks workshop who try to complete a legendary firework called Shuhari.

The film combines hand-crafted visual traditions with experimental animation methods to create a highly distinctive look.

It was selected for the Competition section of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival.

Critics widely praised its imagery, color design, and ambition, even when opinions on the screenplay were more mixed.

The long-established fireworks business Tatedo Fireworks is in serious trouble.

The local fireworks festival has disappeared, and urban redevelopment has brought an order for the family to vacate the property.

Yet the shop’s owner, Eitaro Tatedo, spends his time obsessively trying to create a legendary firework known as Shuhari.

He does little to address the family’s growing crisis.

His younger son, Keitaro Tatedo, and their childhood friend, Kaoru Shikimori, become convinced that launching Shuhari will somehow solve everything.

They secretly take Eitaro’s unfinished firework and attempt to set it off themselves.

The launch fails, and Eitaro disappears.

Four years later, Kaoru has moved to Tokyo and attends art university, where she studies projection mapping while struggling to decide on her future.

One day, Keitaro’s older brother Sentaro Tatedo, now working at the local city office, visits her.

He asks her to help with a town revitalization plan using projection mapping.

He also asks her to bring Keitaro back outside, because Keitaro has shut himself inside the old fireworks shop and refuses to leave.

When Kaoru returns home and sees him again for the first time in years, she discovers that he is still trying to make Shuhari.

After hearing his feelings about the firework, the house, and the town itself, Kaoru decides to stand with him.

Ignoring Sentaro’s attempts to stop them, she joins Keitaro in one last push to launch Shuhari as forced eviction draws near.

Main cast

Keitaro Tatedo — Riku Hagiwara.

Kaoru Shikimori — Kotone Furukawa.

Sentaro Tatedo — Miyu Irino.

Eitaro Tatedo — Takashi Okabe.

Core staff

Director, original creator, screenwriter, storyboard artist — Yoshitoshi Shinomiya.

Character design — Utsushita and Yoshitoshi Shinomiya.

Animation directors — Yoshitoshi Shinomiya and Shohei Hamaguchi.

Hamaguchi was also credited for animation work.

Art directors — Yoshitoshi Shinomiya and Ryoko Majima.

Majima was also credited for scenic art.

Color design — Yoshitoshi Shinomiya, Aiko Mizuno, Tomoko Saito, and Nanako Okazaki.

Director of photography — Anna Tomizaki.

Stop-motion director — Victor Haegelin.

Special animation — Tarafu Otani, Rikako Nakano, and Shana Pagano Lohrey.

Special imagery — SUKIMAKI ANIMATION.

CG director — Kotaro Sasaki.

Editor — Megumi Uchida.

Music — Shuta Hasunuma.

Sound director — Hiroshi Shimizu.

Executive producer — Masaro Toyoshima.

Producers — Fumie Takeuchi, Emmanuel-Alain Raynal, and Pierre Baussaron.

Animation producer — Tsutomu Fujio.

Animation production — Studio Outrigger.

Production — Asmik Ace, Studio Outrigger, and MIYU Production.

Origins of the project

This was Shinomiya’s first feature-length animated film.

He originally worked as a Japanese painter, but by around 2015 he had begun creating moving-image works such as television commercials.

Around 2016, after working on flashback scenes for Your Name, he started receiving many animation-related offers.

At the same time, he felt a growing distance between those jobs and his identity as a painter.

That tension led him to imagine a work that could merge his sensibility for Japanese painting with animation.

Another major inspiration came from changing landscapes after the Great East Japan Earthquake.

Shinomiya recalled seeing a grassy field in front of his studio suddenly covered with solar panels.

While driving past it with his child, he was struck when the child asked, “Is that the sea?”

The reflected light from the panels looked like an ocean, and the image reminded him of his own hometown coastline, which had once been reclaimed.

That feeling of old scenery being replaced by new scenery became one of the film’s central ideas.

The project was first conceived as a short film titled New Dawn.

It originally began from the point where Sentaro visits Kaoru.

For years, Shinomiya pitched the idea to studios and film companies without success.

Budget concerns repeatedly prevented it from moving forward.

During that long development period, many story elements were added and later removed.

At one stage there were mythological motifs such as the Heavenly Rock Cave, and the two leads were even imagined as twins.

Although those ideas were eventually stripped away, traces of them remained in the final script and character designs.

The project finally began serious pre-production around 2022 when Shinomiya brought it to producer Fumie Takeuchi of Asmik Ace.

At that time, the concept had been shaped by market expectations into a polished boy-meets-girl story set to beautiful music.

Takeuchi believed that approach would make the film disappear into the crowd, so she redirected it toward a more author-driven work aimed at international festivals.

Screenplay and themes

Shinomiya described the film’s underlying theme as how communities exist and change over time.

He has said that the story also reflects his own desire to affirm and make peace with the fact that he did not inherit his family’s deep-sea fishing business and instead chose art.

Takeuchi said that one of the hardest parts of script development was shaping Keitaro.

Because he drives the story through negative energy and stubborn resistance, the team spent a great deal of time making sure audiences could still connect with him.

Shinomiya chose fireworks as the film’s central image partly because a fireworks festival from his hometown vanished without much effort to preserve it.

He wanted to connect that quiet loss with the fleeting nature of fireworks themselves.

He also felt fireworks were ideal for cinema because they allow sound and light to be expressed directly.

The film’s title refers to hanarokusho, a traditional green pigment also used in Japanese painting and once used in fireworks.

Shinomiya first learned of the pigment as a student after the Wakayama curry poisoning case, which gave it a frightening image in his mind.

Later, while researching fireworks makers for this film, he heard that craftspeople once used hanarokusho and recognized a meaningful link to his own roots in painting.

The final scene was influenced by American New Cinema.

Shinomiya aimed for an ending that leaves room for interpretation and lingering aftertaste rather than complete closure.

Visual approach

Shinomiya believed that because no one else fully knew what A New Dawn should be, the film needed a strong central hand to shape it.

He therefore closely supervised every stage of the process, from animation and coloring to finishing and compositing.

He personally checked all materials for roughly one thousand cuts.

He especially wanted to avoid settling into the kind of polished “correct” color balance that digital compositing software can encourage in mainstream animation.

To support his unusual workflow, Studio Outrigger built a production line specifically for this film.

A small group of creators who already knew Shinomiya’s methods worked with him in-house, reviewing materials sent in online from outside contributors.

Two especially important collaborators were animation director Shohei Hamaguchi and art director Ryoko Majima.

Hamaguchi originally joined as a key animator, but Shinomiya was so impressed by one of his scenes that he invited him to take on the larger role.

Majima had known Shinomiya since their connection through Your Name.

She was involved from the planning stage and joined after being moved by the consistency of his passion over many years.

In the visual design, Shinomiya mainly handled plants and natural scenery, while Majima focused more on urban structures such as buildings and highways in the Tokyo sequences.

The Tatedo family house became a space where both of their ideas came together.

Special techniques

The film includes stop motion and multiplane-camera-based effects in addition to conventional animation.

Shinomiya has said that this mix feels like a natural extension of painting, because Japanese painting itself is built from many kinds of materials, from plant-based to animal-based substances, brought together into one image.

The stop-motion sequence in which Sentaro becomes intoxicated was produced by the French company MIYU Production.

Its director was Victor Haegelin, who joined after being approached by MIYU Production.

Shinomiya found the collaboration challenging because of time differences and language barriers.

At the same time, he found it thrilling because it was the only part of the film that did not visually originate from his own hand, allowing something outside his usual range to enter the work.

MIYU Production was involved only in that stop-motion portion.

It did not contribute to the rest of the film’s animation.

The multiplane-camera and special imagery work, including underwater and fireworks scenes, was created by SUKIMAKI ANIMATION, led by Makiko Sukigara and Kohei Matsumura.

Shinomiya discovered their work on social media and later invited them to join after finding that they shared similar values.

They approached their contribution as if trying to create a few shots of Fantasia rather than an entire hundred-minute feature.

Their work recreated classic analog effects such as water distortion using ripple glass, an effect famously used in older Disney films.

Shinomiya has said that although such effects can now be simulated in digital compositing, the analog versions carry far greater power and presence.

The same idea guided the film’s use of transmitted-light style effects.

The climax of the fireworks sequence also includes materials made in a workshop led by Shinomiya at Hiroshima Animation Season 2024.

Participants created two kinds of source material.

One involved punching countless holes into black paper, which was then used for light effects.

The other involved painting fireworks in red on white paper, with the colors later inverted to create a striking blue that could not easily be reproduced artificially.

The leads, Keitaro and Kaoru, were voiced by live-action actors Riku Hagiwara and Kotone Furukawa.

For Shinomiya, the key was finding voices that could travel far while still feeling intimate, as if speaking directly to one person.

Both actors were making their first appearance in an animated production.

Both had long been interested in trying voice work.

They found the process difficult at first because animation required precise timing, lip synchronization, and a script rhythm very different from live-action performance.

The recording had originally been planned for one day, but that entire day ended up being used as practice, and the actual recording was done later.

Hagiwara said he felt some personal sympathy for Keitaro’s youth, frustration, and defiance.

At the same time, he found it hard to portray the character across a range that stretched from a boy in the middle of his voice changing to an adult.

Shortly before receiving the offer for the film, Hagiwara had taken part in a dubbing lesson with voice actor Yuriko Yamaguchi on a television program.

He later said that experience gave him emotional support going into the recording.

Furukawa said she was drawn to Kaoru’s uncertainty as she wavers between Keitaro’s dream-driven life and Sentaro’s more stable path.

She tried not to overbuild the performance, keeping it natural and open.

The voice recording took place relatively early in production, when most of the footage still existed only as rough line animation.

Shinomiya said this allowed him to enrich and refine the visuals in response to the actors’ performances.

The theme song is Aoba, performed by imase.

The lyrics and composition were by imase, and the arrangement was by Shuta Hasunuma.

The filmmakers wanted an artist close in age to the characters to carry the end credits.

Hasunuma arranged the piece so that the emotional and tonal world of the film would continue seamlessly into the closing sequence.

Imase said the song was inspired by the realization that everyone gives up certain feelings as they grow older.

He aimed to make a song that still holds traces of youthful blue while welcoming a new self.

At the time of the film’s release, imase was on hiatus.

The song had been created before that break in activity.

In April 2024, the film was chosen for the Annecy Animation Showcase held during Animation Day at the 77th Cannes Film Festival’s Marché du Film.

At that time, it was announced for a 2025 release in Japan.

On January 15, 2025, the teaser trailer and teaser visual revealed the Japanese title and main cast.

The film was again announced for release in 2025.

However, on May 20, 2025, the release was postponed to 2026.

A new teaser and visual were then unveiled on October 10, 2025, confirming the final release date of March 6, 2026.

On February 18, 2026, the film received its world premiere in the Competition section of the 76th Berlin International Film Festival.

Director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya, Riku Hagiwara, and Miyu Irino attended the screening.

From February 28 to March 15, 2026, an exhibition celebrating the film and Shinomiya’s work as a painter was held at Shibuya PARCO.

The film opened theatrically across 106 cinemas in Japan on March 6, 2026.

Critical response

Anime critic Ryota Fujitsu wrote that the film takes place within an extremely small span of time and space, centered on a single day and a mountain house, yet fills that narrow frame with ideas as vast as eight hundred years of history and the shape of the universe.

He argued that while the emotional core concerns the settling of childhood issues, especially for Keitaro, the work gains its power from the way long time and broad space are layered onto that personal skeleton.

Film critic Shohei Chujo praised the film’s themes of land reclamation and mega-solar development as provocative.

He also highlighted the unconventional visual approach, especially drawings that spill beyond normal lines and contours, and called the film a promising sign of a new wave in animation after Studio Ghibli, Mamoru Hosoda, and Makoto Shinkai.

Chujo further described Keitaro and Kaoru’s fireworks as a kind of revolution through beauty.

In his view, their act tries to break through the suffocating logic of utility that dominates modern life, even if only for a moment.

For The Hollywood Reporter, Leslie Felperin found the screenplay less emotionally weighty than broader-access works such as Your Name or Spirited Away.

Even so, she strongly praised the film’s originality of image and its EDM-leaning music, describing the experience as dreamlike and deeply pleasurable.

She also suggested that the film’s handling of fireworks and administrative eviction might someday influence how those subjects are imagined in culture, much as certain iconic anime films reshaped associations around their own motifs.

Her review described the film as muddled but strikingly dreamy.

Cinema Today published short reviews by Kurei Hibiki, Naoto Mori, and Hiroaki Saito.

Kurei praised the film as a showcase for Shinomiya’s gifts as a Japanese painter, especially in its backgrounds, color, and audiovisual beauty, though he found the story somewhat familiar.

Mori likewise praised the visuals and interpreted the heroes’ attempt to change reality through Shuhari as the prayer of an artist who wants to transform the world through art.

He also linked the film’s afterglow to one of Shinomiya’s earlier music video works.

Saito admired the unusual compositions and comfortable camera movement.

However, he felt the compact story and restrained dialogue made it harder to become emotionally immersed.

Soundtrack

The original soundtrack by Shuta Hasunuma was released on March 4, 2026, through windandwindows.

It includes the film score as well as the theme song Aoba - Movie Version by imase.

Novelization

A novelization by Minami Aoyama, titled A New Dawn: The Two Miraculous Days of the Phantom Firework I Believed In With You, was published by Starts Publishing on December 28, 2025.

It expanded the film’s world ahead of the theatrical release.