Film screens in New York on Sunday at film festival

The staff of Kenji Kamiyama's Ancien and the Magic Tablet ( Hirune Hime ~Shiranai Watashi no Monogatari~ ) anime film announced during a stage greeting event for the film on Saturday that the film will open in 40 countries and regions worldwide.

The film opened in Japan on Saturday in 232 theaters nationwide. The New York International Children's Film Festival (NYICFF) will screen the film on Sunday in Japanese with English subtitles. Kamiyama is attending the screening.

NYICFF describes the story:

This fender and genre-bending film takes us into the not-too-distant machine-driven future. Kokone should be diligently studying for her university entrance exams, but she just can't seem to stay awake. Aside from stealing precious study time, her napping is even more distracting, as it brings on strange dreams with warring machines that hint at family secrets that have been dormant for years. She can't ask her father, a hipster mechanic more talented and artful than his job requires, as he's always busy modifying motorcycles and cars in flights of fancy. What are these visions that lead Kokone at once closer to and farther away from her family? Like all the best anime, the film revels in multilayered fantasy to show how sometimes opposites—waking and dreaming, the past and the future—are far more intertwined than they appear.

Lead actress Mitsuki Takahata performed the film's theme song, a cover of The Monkees' "Daydream Believer" song.

The film stars:

Mitsuki Takahata as Kokone Morikawa/Ancien

Arata Furuta as Ichirō Watanabe

Hideki Takahashi as Isshin Shijima/King Heartland

Shinnosuke Mitsushima as Morio Sawatari

Tomoya Maeno as Kijita/Takiiji

Yosuke Eguchi as Momotarō Morikawa/Pōchi

Rie Kugimiya as Joy

Wataru Takagi as Sawatari/Ukkii

Risa Shimizu as Ikumi Morikawa

I.G Port's new anime studio subsidiary Signal.MD (Tantei Team KZ Jiken Note, Anime Tamago's "Colorful Ninja Iromaki" short) animated the film as its first anime film project. Kamiyama ( Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex , Moribito - Guardian of the Spirit , Eden of the East ) directed the film and penned the script. Satoko Morikawa ( The Cat Returns , Eden of the East , Xi Avant ) designed the characters, and Shigeto Koyama ( Michiko & Hatchin , Moribito - Guardian of the Spirit , Heroman ) was charge of mechanical design. Yoko Shimomura ( Kingdom Hearts, Final Fantasy XV ) composed the music for the film.

Source: Eiga.com