, whose daily life – walks to school along the canal side, cycling with classmates, building water rockets in science class – might as well be unfolding in the 1990s, never mind the 2040s. In fact it isn't a person at all, but the Sawatari family's electronic housekeeper Nanako (Aoi Yûki). This enervatingly chipper droid has its circuitry hijacked by the creature, who petitions the space-travel-mad Yuma and his friends to make the necessary preparations for its return trip. Adapted from a 2011 manga series by Tetsuya Imai, Tomoyuki Kurokawa's film unfolds at a far more leisurely pace than its Stranger Things-like premise might suggest. The youngsters' efforts to send February Dawn home become merely the central thread of a broader coming-of-age story, in which such everyday trials as bullying, moving house and parent-child disagreements are weathered by Yuma and his peers. It's all sweetly done – the kids, if perhaps not their robot companion, are a sympathetic bunch, and Zero-G's artists and animators bathe much of the action in wistful peach and teal light. But with two hours to fill, the plotting meande){kind=link}
In Tomoyuki Kurokawa’s rites of passage fantasy, a group of youngsters from 2049 help to repatriate an extraterrestrial visitor
In Blade Runner 2049, the planet was choked by pollution, climate collapse had taken hold, and most nonhuman life was extinct. Break of Dawn’s rendering of that same year is far sunnier: things are more or less as they are now, but with robotic au pairs and better mobile phones.
There’s a strong tang of nostalgia to this jewel-bright new sci-fi anime from studio Zero-G, in which the young residents of a well-preserved 1950s housing complex help repatriate an alien artificial intelligence who’s spent the last 27 years stuck on Earth in sleep mode. This extraterrestrial visitor, voiced by Romi Park and going by the name of February Dawn, arrived on a jellyfish-like probe in the summer of 2022, and has been hibernating ever since, disguised as a block of flats on the estate.
The first person to happen upon February isn’t our young hero Yuma Sawatari (Hana Sugisaki), whose daily life – walks to school along the canal side, cycling with classmates, building water rockets in science class – might as well be unfolding in the 1990s, never mind the 2040s. In fact it isn’t a person at all, but the Sawatari family’s electronic housekeeper Nanako (Aoi Yûki). This enervatingly chipper droid has its circuitry hijacked by the creature, who petitions the space-travel-mad Yuma and his friends to make the necessary preparations for its return trip.
Adapted from a 2011 manga series by Tetsuya Imai, Tomoyuki Kurokawa’s film unfolds at a far more leisurely pace than its Stranger Things-like premise might suggest. The youngsters’ efforts to send February Dawn home become merely the central thread of a broader coming-of-age story, in which such everyday trials as bullying, moving house and parent-child disagreements are weathered by Yuma and his peers. It’s all sweetly done – the kids, if perhaps not their robot companion, are a sympathetic bunch, and Zero-G’s artists and animators bathe much of the action in wistful peach and teal light.