The Girl Who Leapt Through Time Director Announces New Film

Director Mamoru Hosoda has created many beautiful films that take viewers away to magical worlds. The man behind The Boy and The Beast, Wolf Children, Summer Wars and The Girl Who Lept Through Time will be releasing a brand new film in 2018. The new film will be debuted at the Cannes Film Festival and has the working title of Mirai, which means future in Japanese.

Mirai will be a fantasy based family drama which revolves around a four-year old boy. The boy is struggling to accept his new baby sister, and randomly stumbles into a time-traveling portal in his yard. He goes back into time to when his mother was a girl herself, and through the journey learns to appreciate his new sister and become the big brother he was meant to be.

Hosoda was recently interviewed by Variety and talked about the style of films, he said,

"There is a common thread in the themes of my films, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time was about youth, Summer Wars was about family, Wolf Children was about motherhood, The Boy and The Beast was about the father, and my new film is about the relationship between brothers and sisters. Mirai is about a boy who is trying to reclaim the love of his parents."

The director puts a lot of love and care into his films, as he see them as personal stories. He is a father of two children and uses his experience with his children as inspiration for his films.

"I always strive to make films that have a universal dimension in the choice of subjects and even the dialogue," he told Variety. "I never had the opportunity to have a drink or a meal with my father. He was hardly ever at home and as a father his existence was ambiguous."

Hosoda's latest film, The Boy and The Beast, was very popular, earning $49 million at the Japanese box office. A special screening of his work was shown at Tokyo's International Film Festival last year, and his stories are sometimes compared to Miyazaki and Studio Ghibli.