After Your Name, this great Japanese animated film soon to be adapted into live-action

While the trend is towards live-action adaptations of Japanese anime, we learn that this classic of Japanese animated cinema will soon be adapted. We tell you everything!

A masterpiece of Japanese cinema

Japanese animation is enjoying growing success around the world. While Netflix has made a specialty of adapting works like Eiichiro Oda's One Piece into live action – we recently learned the name of the actor in charge of playing the pirate captain Crocodile in the sequel to the series -,the public seems to increasingly trust these projects, which a few years ago still aroused a distrust inherited from the disastrous Dragon Ball Evolution. Many works will soon be adapted, starting with Naruto by Masashi Kishimoto.

We learned today that the film 5 centimeters per second by Makoto Shinkai, released in 2007, will also be adapted into live-action. Produced by Spoon Studio and Toho (whose credits include the Godzilla films), the film will be directed by Yoshiyuki Okuyama, while the screenplay has been entrusted to Ayako Suzuki. While the film's cast has already been chosen, the only name revealed to the public is that of Hokuto Matsumura, who Makoto Shinkai fans will know in particular because he lent his voice to the character of Souta Munakatain the filmmaker's latest masterpiece,Suzume(2022).

5 centimeters per secondis the second animated feature film by Makoto Shinkai. It tells the story of three periods in the life of a young boy named Takaki Tōno, between 1990 and 2008. It follows the story of friendship and thwarted love between two childhood friends. Very poetic, the film has the feel of Past Lives, a love drama directed by Korean and Canadian filmmaker Celine Song and produced by A24, starring Greta Lee and Teo Yoo.

This new film is therefore the second live-action adaptation project of a Makoto Shinkai film after Your Name (2016), which experienced a difficult production, with numerous rewrites and several line-up changes. However, whether we are happy about these projects or not, they say a lot about the place that Makoto Shinkai occupies in Japanese animated cinema today. Considered by many specialists as the most worthy heir to Hayao Miyazaki, to whom he paid a vibrant tribute in Journey to Agartha (2011), three of his films have entered the top 20 highest-grossing films on Japanese soil: Your Name (2016) in fifth place, Suzume (2022) in sixteenth and Children of Time (2019) in seventeenth.

While some animated films have managed to establish themselves in this ranking, in the manner of One Piece: Red  Gorō Taniguchi (2022), Detective Conan: The Star a million dollars(2024), Demon Slayer: Mugen Trainby Haruo Sotozaki (2020) or the remarkable The First Slam Dunk  by Takehiko Inoue (2022), Makoto Shinkai is the only filmmaker with Hayao Miyazaki whose several films are present in this very closed club. A great performance! /p>