Interest
Penguin Highway Novel Creator Discusses Aoyama's Interest in Breasts
posted on by Jennifer Sherman
A special screening event was held for Hiroyasu Ishida and Studio Colorido's Penguin Highway anime film at TOHO CINEMAS Hibiya in Tokyo on Thursday. Ishida and the original novel author Tomihiko Morimi (pictured right) appeared at the event.
Ishida and Morimi discussed the history of the production at the event, and Morimi revealed that he has not been able to experience the film at a movie theater because he is busy with current projects. However, his father has gone in his place three times and given it his approval. In discussing reading Morimi's novel for the first time, Ishida said, "I didn't necessarily have the same experiences as Aoyama during my childhood, but it felt like things like memories, feelings, and impulses from when I was a child were called to mind."
The event also featured a Q&A session in which audience members asked Ishida and Morimi questions. One question asked about a particular fixation of Aoyama, the inquisitive fourth-grade boy who stars in the film. Due to Aoyama's interest in female breasts in the anime, an audience member asked Morimi, "Do you like boobs?" Morimi explained, "Aoyama is a character I wrote with distorted exaggerations of various parts of my own childhood." Continuing, he said that he wanted to write about Aoyama confronting various mysteries. As Aoyama explores mysterious circumstances around him, he ends up interested in female breasts because they are unknown to him as a young boy. Therefore, Morimi believes he had to write about Aoyama discovering breasts.
The story of the original novel centers on fourth grader Aoyama (Kana Kita) and a mysterious older woman (Yū Aoi), who is a dental assistant and also Aoyama's first crush. When a group of penguins appears in his quiet suburban neighborhood, Aoyama works to uncover the reason for their appearance.
The film opened in Japan on August 17. Ishida, who directed Colorido's "Hinata no Aoshigure" and "Fumiko's Confession" shorts, directed the film as his first feature-length directorial work. Typhoon Noruda director Yōjirō Arai designed the characters for the film. Makoto Ueda, who wrote and supervised the scripts for anime adaptations of Morimi's The Tatami Galaxy and Night is Short, Walk On Girl novels, returned to pen the script for this film.
Eleven Arts plans to screen the film in the United States in winter 2019.
Source: Comic Natalie
