movie review: A New Dawn (2026)
For the second day of Golden Week, I went to see "A New Dawn" at Cinemalice in Jinbocho. This is an animated movie directed by Yoshitoshi Shinomiya. Shinomiya is a nihonga artist1 and worked under Makoto Shinkai; A New Dawn is his directional debut for a feature-length film.
*This is a spoiler-free review. I won't give away the ending or specific plot details, but I will talk about the broader strokes of the plot, so be warned.
Synopsis
The film centers around Sentarō, Keitarō, and Kaoru, three children who grew up in a family that has run a traditional fireworks business for multiple centuries. However, the end is near: Business isn't going well, and their house is scheduled to be demolished for a re-development project. The movie shows how the characters deal with this inevitable fate, centering around a mysterious type of firework called the shuhari that their father left unfinished before he disappeared.
The visuals
A New Dawn is an absolutely gorgeous movie. You can clearly tell that it was made by a visual artist. It's one of those movies where almost any still could be used as a desktop wallpaper. In this sense, the Makoto Shinkai influence is very clear. However, while Makoto Shinkais movies tend to be very "clean" and lean towards the realistic, A New Dawn is looser and more impressionistic in its style. The colours are very luminous and light, leaning towards the pastel range. This gives it a very strong "summer anime movie" feeling.2
It's not only the backgrounds that are beautiful though; the animation, staging, camerawork and other stylistic elements are, too. In addition to traditional animation, the movie features some 3D and stop-motion effects. The 3D effects are integrated well and don't stand out too much against the 2D animation. The movie is not afraid to experiment with lots of different effects, to the degree that it borders on the self-indulgent. Some of the direction feels a bit extra in the sense that some very eye-catching visual effects are used for scenes that don't really call for them. This could be seen as negative, but overall I found the movie to be very enjoyable on the visual side, to the point that I'm thinking about going to see it a second time just for this aspect.
Plot
The plot is ... fine. The whole movie takes place over the course of just two days (combined with some flash-forwards and flashbacks) and is very "compact." There are no big twists, the story more or less goes where you'd expect it to go. Unlike movies like Your Name, it doesn't elicit a very strong emotional response ... which sounds negative, but as someone who always found Your Name (and other Shinkai movies) to be a bit sappy, this was actually a positive for me. It's easy enough to be understood and doesn't try too hard to pull on your heartstrings.
Online, I've seen some people critisising the film for being too hard to follow and not illustrating the character's motivations and emotions clearly enough. It's not the easiest to follow, that's for sure, which also has to do with the voice acting, at least for me (more on that later). However, this is another aspect that almost felt refreshing to me. I find that anime movies tend to be too easy to follow, meaning that characters often spell out their motivations way too clearly (basically, that cliche where the main character, teary-eyed, screams something about the value of family or friendship). A New Dawn is a bit less hand-holdy about it, even though that means some things are left rather vague and unclear.
The plot is at its weakest in the second act, where the pacing becomes a bit wonky; the movie loses its direction and becomes rather haphazard for a bit. I also found some developments to be a bit needlessly grandiose or rushed. Overall, the plot is fine. Not amazing, not atrocious, just fine. It's pretty clear that it plays second fiddle to the visuals, but it does what it has to do to carry the movie.
Characters
The protagonist is Kaoru Shikimori, the "middle child" of the family, and her two "brothers" Sentarō and Keitarō Obinata.3 Just like the plot, these characters are ... fine. I really liked the performance of Kaoru's voice actress (Furukawa Kotone), maybe because it doesn't sound like the typical "anime girl" voice. Sometimes, the voices were on the mumbly side though. There were some scenes where I had trouble understanding what was being said, even though I understood the wider context.
Just like the plot isn't very emotionally gripping, none of the characters are especially relatable. You do get their motivations, but don't really feel an emotional bond forming between you and them over the course of the movie. This is another aspect that looks negative when written out like this, but didn't bother me very much. Honestly, I'd rather have it be like this instead of being shown some far-fetched tragic backstory. I will concede that it leads to the characters lacking some depth, though. I think this is mostly due to the short runtime of the movie - it's not even a classic "tight 90" (instead clocking in at 76 minutes). It could have definitely profited from 15~20 more minutes dedicated to building up Kaoru as the protagonist.
Conclusion
To me, A New Dawn falls into the same category as Children of the Sea, another "anime summer movie" back from 2019 that I enjoyed quite a lot. It's visually stunning and a pure joy to just sit and watch ... like a firework, quite fittingly. The plot and characters are on the weaker side and provide an easy attack surface for criticism ("all style, no substance", "just the director showing off", etc). It does feel like the kind of project where not only the director, but also all the other artists involved went crazy and mainly focused on pulling out all the stops on the visual side instead of creating a more considered, writing-focused kind of film. But I'm actually very fine with sitting down and watching one-and-a-quarter hour of an artist's creative vision sometimes. Instead of being a "turn your brain off" movie, it's of the "turn your aesthetic sensibilities on" kind of deal (brain activity = regular). I definitely recommend it, especially seeing it in the theater. I can't imagine the effects having quite the same impact on a smaller TV or computer screens.
Nihonga is a style of Japanese painting using pigments made from minerals, which are applied to the medium using a type of glue. In contrast to yōga (Western paintings, esp. oil paintings), nihonga has a flatter, matte-leaning look. Typical examples are the folding screen paintings in Japanese temples or residences.↩
This film was released in March 2026, but is very much a summer movie. The movie is set in August, and fireworks in Japan are traditionally associated with summer.↩
This is an example for one of the details that the plot leaves unclear. Its obvious from the names (and the dialogue in the movie) that Kaoru and the boys aren't blood-related, but she's very much considered to be part of the family.↩