Studio Brain’s Base does a fairly solid job on the animation, though it definitely lacks in detail in some areas. This review does contain some spoilers below, so if the movie sounds interesting, I’d recommend watching it first and then coming back for my analysis. It opened in Japan in 2011 and has since won the Jury Prize at the Scotland Loves Animation festival and the Animation Film Award at the 66th annual Mainichi Film Awards. The anime was adapted from its one-shot shoujo manga and picked up for production by studio Brain’s Base. We follow their growing love as Hotaru gets older but Gin does not, ever limited in their relationship. Every summer after that, Hotaru returns to that forest to visit the man named Gin. The man leads her out of the forest but warns her that if she touches him he will disappear. Hotarubi no Mori e focuses on the relationship between a young girl named Hotaru who meets a strange man wearing a mask while lost in the forest when she is six years old. As much as I did like Into the Forest of Fireflies’ Light, there are a few points of the plot and pacing that I think could have been handled differently. However, I definitely think you can see a fairly big difference in experience and story-telling skill between this film and her later series. I’m a huge fan of Natsume and could feel a lot of the same wonderment through her positive representation of the youkai characters throughout. Best known for her other work Natsume’s Book of Friends, it is thought that the mangaka Yuki Midorikawa took a lot of inspiration for that manga from this story which is fairly easy to see. The movie itself is about 45 minutes in length, good enough for a one-shot story with a fairly simple premise. I came across this short film a little while ago and it looked interesting enough to cover while waiting for the seasonal anime to finish up.
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