Imagine a future in which nobody has to work any more. No commute, no performance reviews, no shared office fridge. In the hands of Iain M. Banks that would be the Culture, all drone banter and spaceships with silly names. In the hands of Japanese animation it is, naturally, a quietly crushing dystopia. The main trailer has arrived for ghost – end of night (ghost/yoru no hate), the first original feature from Shingo Natsume, director of Sonny Boy, and it opens in Japanese cinemas on 11 February 2027.
Madhouse is animating, which carries some weight in a field where the studio’s back catalogue includes Perfect Blue and Paprika. Natsume is directing and writing. His CV includes the first season of One-Punch Man and ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept., but Sonny Boy is the useful reference here, a 2021 series about schoolchildren marooned in a dimension of their own that left half its audience mesmerised and the other half wondering whether they’d missed an episode. Expect ambition, then, and possibly homework.
The set-up has a whiff of Logan’s Run by way of Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano. In a near future where labour is no longer necessary, everyone undergoes a “selection” at eighteen to decide whether the world needs them. The heroine, Nike (romanised in some early material as Neekei), was selected early, at fifteen, and has the privileged job of managing the “starry sky” of a virtual reality network. She still doesn’t fit in. Then she meets Mas, a man who lost his family and has spent the years since wandering and covering himself in tattoos. The trailer gives Nike plenty of teenage fire, including a promise to drop a bomb on the heads of fools, which is how most of us felt at fifteen, if rarely with such commendable directness.
Mayu Hotta voices Nike and Issei Takahashi plays Mas, with Takeo Otsuka, Kazuhiro Yamaji, Yuki Shin, Hina Yomiya and Atsumi Tanezaki among the newly announced supporting voices. Manga artist Natsume Ono (ACCA, House of Five Leaves) drew the original character designs, adapted for animation by Sonny Boy‘s Norifumi Kugai. Ohzora Kimishima composed the score, his first for a film, and the alt-rock band Hitsujibungaku provides both the theme song, “life”, and the insert song “Sugar”. Bandai Namco Filmworks distributes, and a manga version by himiko is already running in Kadokawa’s Young Ace.
There’s no word yet on a UK release, though the film has already done the festival rounds, including a slot at the Tokyo International Film Festival, so a distributor is likely to be sniffing around. Here at SFcrowsnest we’re keen. A director who makes ambiguity his house style, a studio with Satoshi Kon in its family tree and a premise about what people are for once the machines have taken the jobs is a promising mix. It’s also, in late 2026, uncomfortably close to a documentary.
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