On Monday, GKIDS announced its acquisition of the North American distribution rights to Mamoru Hosoda’s acclaimed films: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Boy and The Beast. Summer Wars and Wolf Children will be immediately added to GKIDS’ catalog, while The Girl Who Leapt Through Time and The Boy and The Beast will follow suit next year. Plans are in place for new theatrical releases as well as home video releases for these films.
This isn’t GKIDS’ first collaboration with Hosoda, as they have previously released his later works, Mirai and BELLE, and handled the theatrical release of Summer Wars in the United States.
Previously, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time saw releases by Bandai Entertainment on DVD in 2008 and on Blu-ray Disc in 2011. Funimation later acquired the rights and released it on Blu-ray Disc in 2016 and again in 2022.
Funimation has also previously released Summer Wars, Wolf Children, and The Boy and The Beast on both DVD and Blu-ray Disc formats. Anime News Network describes the four movies as follows:
The Girl Who Leaped Through Time
When 17-year-old Makoto Konno gains the ability to, quite literally, “leap” backwards through time, she immediately sets about improving her grades and preventing personal mishaps. However, she soon realises that changing the past isn’t as simple as it seems, and eventually, will have to rely on her new powers to shape the future of herself and her friends.
Summer Wars
When timid eleventh-grader and math genius Kenji Koiso is asked by older student and secret crush Natsuki to come with her to her family’s Nagano home for a summer job, he agrees without hesitation. Natsuki’s family, the Jinnouchi clan, dates back to the Muromachi era, and they’ve all come together to celebrate the 90th birthday of the spunky matriarch of the family, Sakae. That’s when Kenji discovers his “summer job” is to pretend to be Natsuki’s fiancé and dance with her at the birthday celebration. As Kenji attempts to keep up with Natsuki’s act around her family, he receives a strange math problem on his cell phone which, being a math genius, he can’t resist solving. As it turns out, the solution to the mysterious equation causes a hijacking of the social networking site through which most of the world’s social and business traffic flows.
Wolf Children
Hana is a 19-year-old student who falls in a “fairy-tale like” love with a “wolf man”. Over the course of the 13-year story Hana gives birth to two children—older sister Yuki, and younger brother Ame, or “Snow and Rain”. At first the family quietly lives in city trying to hide their wolf heritage, but when the “wolf man” suddenly dies Hana makes the decision to move to a rural town, far from their previous city life.
The Boy and the Beast
There is the the human realm and the bakemono realm (“Jūtengai”). In these two worlds which must not intersect, there lives a lonely boy in Tokyo’s Shibuya ward and a lonely bakemono. One day, the boy gets lost in the bakemono world, becomes the disciple of the bakemono Kumatetsu, and is renamed Kyūta.
In conclusion, stay tuned for more exciting anime news.
Source: ANN
