GKIDS To Bring Quartet Of Mamoru Hosoda Films To U.S. Theaters After Acquiring The Director’s Full Studio Chizu Catalog

Hot off its first Academy Award win with Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron, North American distributor GKIDS has secured rights to the full catalog of films from Oscar-nominated director Mamoru Hosoda produced by his Studio Chizu.

GKIDS says it’s committed to increasing the reach of films produced by Hosoda’s Studio Chizu through multiple distribution routes, and will be giving four newly-acquired titles U.S. theatrical and home entertainment releases. This feels like an extension of the distributors recent push to put important anime films that got no, or poor, distribution into North American cinemas. Just last week, the company hosted the first U.S. theatrical release of the 1997 classic The End of Evangelion.

Already the U.S. distributor of Hosoda’s two most recent features – Oscar-nominee Mirai (2018) and Belle (2021) – GKIDS has picked up rights to four more of the director’s films:

• The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (2006)
• Summer Wars (2009)
• Wolf Children (2012)
• The Boy and the Beast (2015)

Summer Wars and Wolf Children will join the GKIDS library immediately, with The Boy and the Beast and The Girl Who Leapt Through Time will arrive in 2025.

Hosoda’s six features have all been nominated for, and five have won, the Japan Academy Prize for Animation of the Year. Hosoda remains the only Japanese animation director outside of Studio Ghibli to receive an Academy Award nomination for best animated feature.

GKIDS’ President David Jesteadt said in a release:

One of GKIDS’ earliest distribution projects was the theatrical release of Summer Wars when Mamoru Hosoda had already cemented his position as one of the most exciting animation directors. We were honored to deepen our relationship with the release of his two latest films, Mirai and Belle, and are excited to now be able to showcase the full breadth of Hosoda’s ambitious storytelling across his film catalog, featuring some of the most acclaimed and successful Japanese animated films of all time.