The official website for Studio 4°C’s anime film of Daisuke Igarashi’s Children of the Sea (Kaijū no Kodomo) manga began streaming a music video for Kenshi Yonezu’s theme song “Umi no Yūrei” (Ghost of the Sea) on Tuesday. The video previews the whole song, and shows clips from the film.
Yonezu wrote and performs the song. The newly written song is Yonezu’s first theme for a film. Yonezu and Igarashi have been friends since Yonezu contributed the official image song for Igarashi’s “Louvre No. 9 — Manga, the 9th Art” museum exhibition in France in 2016.
Viz Media published the manga in English, and it describes the story:
When Ruka was younger, she saw a ghost in the water at the aquarium where her dad works. Now she feels drawn toward the aquarium and the two mysterious boys she meets there, Umi and Sora. They were raised by dugongs and hear the same strange calls from the sea as she does.
Ruka’s dad and the other adults who work at the aquarium are only distantly aware of what the children are experiencing as they get caught up in the mystery of the worldwide disappearance of the oceans’ fish.
Joe Hisaishi of Studio Ghibli fame is composing the music for the film. Ayumu Watanabe (Space Brothers, After the Rain) is directing, and Kenichi Konishi (Tokyo Godfathers, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya) is the animation director and character designer.
The film will open in Japan on June 7. GKIDS will screen the film theatrically in North America in Japanese and English in 2019. The film will screen at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in June this year in the festival’s new Contrechamp category.
Igarashi launched the manga in Shogakukan’s IKKI magazine in 2007, and ended it in 2011. Shogakukan published five compiled book volumes for the manga, and Viz Media published all five volumes in English. The manga earned nominations and awards of excellence from the 38th Japan Cartoonist Awards, the American Library Association’s Young Adult Library Services Association, the School Library Journal, and the 13th Japan Media Arts Festival Awards.