A New Dawn Anime Film Review

Perhaps there’s a certain irony in a story about a fireworks factory mostly keeping away from explosive drama. Yoshitoshi Shinomiya‘s lowkey feature directorial debut A New Dawn is at the very least visually captivating, comprised of lush and rather hypnotic production design. The story is small scale focusing on a trio of friends who try to save a fireworks factory in their hometown, but the imagery feels expansive and lush. A New Dawn begins with a beautiful and vaguely familiar display of this beauty: the flowing, painterly imagery of its opening sequence recalls Shinomiya’s work on the flashback sequence in Makoto Shinkai‘s your name., immediately showing that the film’s visuals might transcend its small town drama.

A background artist himself on films by Makoto Shinkai as well as the similarly resplendent Pompo: The Cinéphile, it makes sense that this history would be felt in the background works of A New Dawn. They’re dense with detail, rich with almost luminous color and illustrative texture. Shinomiya, who also wrote and storyboarded the film, veers away from the photorealism associated with someone like Shinkai through some impressionist touches – like the splotches of green paint which represent treelines – which sometimes turns into outright abstraction like when a character begins to run through the space. Sometimes there are swaying, morphing textures in the background as splotches of paint subtly shift around. On a more intimate level, the cluttered and characterful interior spaces tell a story too. This is a long-winded way of saying A New Dawn looks really, really good.

It’s not just in the tableaux of its countryside habitats and ramshackle living spaces carved out of abandoned warehouses, but there’s a sense of invention permeating through A New Dawn‘s various experiments with visual languages of animation. The most prominent is an incredibly charming stop motion animated sequence using a cardboard diorama and real human hands invading the shot in a creative reflection of a drunken character’s perspective. Even though it broadly still looks “anime” through its character design, there are also smaller details which work to set A New Dawn apart from its contemporaries, touches like its occasional lineless artwork or the way rain is defined through smudged black brushstrokes.

It’s in the screenwriting where A New Dawn begins to feel more run of the mill. Its story about the constant chasing of the majesty of a fabled firework “Shuhari” feels both familiar in its premise but also a little bit alienating in its structure. The importance of the firework itself never feels clear – the moment its mystery is unravelled hardly feels like a revelation as a result, something amplified by how the writing often obfuscates what anyone is talking about. The whole story feels a little distancing, and despite the allure of the background art and design of the spaces the characters inhabit, the people themselves feel constantly at arms length.

It almost pulls things back with its climax – the detonation of the “Shuhari” goes a long way in justifying the circular conversations about its nature and origins – a painted streak of light launches into the sky before turning into something otherworldly, suddenly tripling down on the film’s captivating exaggerations.