Gkids Acquires Cocoon - One Summer of Girlhood for North American Theatrical Release
The acquisition marks the first North American theatrical release for a deeply personal wartime story from a veteran Ghibli-affiliated team, bringing a 2025 Japanese TV anime to a wider international audience.
Reporting from 3 sources: Anime News Network, Variety Anime, Cartoon Brew.
Gkids has acquired all North American rights to the wartime anime film Cocoon - One Summer of Girlhood, based on Machiko Kyo's manga, and will begin screening it in theaters on September 4. The film will be available in Japanese with English subtitles and with an English dub. It will have its North American premiere at the JAPAN CUTS event in July before the wider theatrical rollout. The 63-minute feature, directed by Yukimitsu Ina in his directorial debut, follows two schoolgirls, San and Mayu, on a tropical southern island during World War II. As war escalates, the students are ordered to nurse the wounded in a military hospital hidden in a cave, and they lose friends one by one. The anime originally debuted on BS-NHK in March 2025 and later aired on NHK General that August. The music was composed by Kensuke Ushio, and Hitomi Tateno, a former Studio Ghibli animator, served as animation producer. The studio Sasayuri produced the anime. Gkids said it will announce home entertainment plans and details about the English-language cast later this year.
Yukimitsu Ina, making his directorial debut, previously worked on the television series Keep Your Hands Off Eizouken! and the Star Wars: Visions short "Tatooine Rhapsody." Ina co-wrote the screenplay with Taku Kishimoto.
The film brings together veteran animators Akihiko Yamashita and Shinji Otsuka, whose credits include Spirited Away, The Boy and the Heron, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Princess Mononoke. The voice cast stars Hikari Mitsushima as Mayu and Marika Itō as San.
Machiko Kyo released the original manga in 2010, 65 years after the end of World War II. The anime's 2025 release came 80 years after the war ended. Viz Media licensed the manga. Kyo's earlier manga Mitsuami no Kami-sama won an award in the 18th Annual Osamu Tezuka Cultural Prize in March 2014. That manga inspired Production I.G's 28-minute short anime film Pigtails, which won the Platinum Remi Award at the 2016 WorldFest Houston International Film Festival and the Diamond Award at the 2016 California Film Awards.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 3 cited sources below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.