If the embed won’t play, the new trailer (in Japanese) is also here on YouTube.
Maomao, anime’s favourite poison-sampling palace servant, is leaving the comfort of the inner court for her first trip to the big screen, and TOHO has just released the main trailer for The Apothecary Diaries: The Late Lady’s Treasure, along with a new key visual and its theme song. That song is “Haru ga Tomori” (“Spring Lights”) by Kenshi Yonezu, the man behind “Lemon”, the Chainsaw Man opening “Kick Back” and the theme for Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron. When a franchise hires Yonezu, it is telling you it expects to fill cinemas.
The film opens in Japan on 11 December. Crunchyroll has picked up theatrical rights for most of the world outside Asia, working with Sony Pictures, though British fans should not start queuing at the multiplex just yet: release dates beyond Japan have still to be announced.
The story is an original by Natsu Hyūga, who writes the light novels, rather than an adaptation of an existing volume. The emperor orders Jinshi to fulfil the last wish of a concubine who died five years ago by returning her remains to her homeland. Jinshi inspects the body and finds it in suspiciously perfect condition, as lovely as if she were still breathing, which in most genres is a bad sign and in this one is practically a confession. So he drags Maomao south to Binan-shu, a province ruled by the Bi clan, and a bustling city on the water, where she is thrilled by the exotic herbs and rather less thrilled by the pirates tearing the place apart in search of a treasure their late leader hid away. Jinshi’s stated hope that nothing will go wrong lasts about as long as you’d expect, with a major incident erupting on the day of the funeral.
Aoi Yūki and Takeo Ōtsuka return as Maomao and Jinshi, with Mariya Ise, best known as Reg in Made in Abyss, joining as the troubled Muqing, and Kenshō Ono and Miyuki Sawashiro among a crowd of new faces from the pirate crew and the late consort’s household. Norihiro Naganuma directs at TOHO animation STUDIO. Hyūga is also writing a novelisation that will include material which wouldn’t squeeze into the running time, the light-novel equivalent of a director’s cut.
It’s easy to see why the series travels. Strip away the silk and lanterns and The Apothecary Diaries is a historical detective story, a cousin to Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels, starring a heroine who would get on famously with Brother Cadfael, provided he kept the monkshood locked away. Maomao is a gloriously unsentimental sleuth who would happily nibble a suspect toadstool in the name of science, and her slow-burn, maddening chemistry with Jinshi has kept audiences hooked since 2023. The third TV season is airing now, with its second half due in April 2027, a live-action series is coming in 2028 and a console game is promised for early next year. The palace intrigue business, it seems, is booming.
The film’s earlier trailers have promised a broader canvas than the TV series, a floating city and a heroine forced to do rather more running about than her usual routine of grinding powders in a back room allows. Whether the jump to cinema blunts the show’s quiet wit remains to be seen, but a murder mystery wrapped around an impossibly preserved corpse is a solid place to start. Bring your own antidote.
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