I got to see a very, very rare Japanese film last night: Tomcat’s Big Adventure (ちびねこトムの大冒険 地球を救え！なかまたち / Chibineko Tom no Daibouken: Chikyuu o Sukue! Nakama-tachi)
Background
Tomcat’s Big Adventure was to be the debut feature of Ryūtarō Nakamura, best known as the director of serial experiments lain (1998) and Kino’s Journey (2003). Five years in the making, it was an anime adaptation of a children’s book by Masumi Iino and Yumiko Imai, and featured incredible talent from the likes of Toshiyuki Inoue and Hiroyuki Okiura (key animation), Manabu Ōhashi (a.k.a. Mao Lamdo, animation direction & character design), Kenji Kawai (music), Hiromasa Ogura (art direction & background art), and Shigeharu Shiba (audio direction). Despite production being temporarily halted due to a cost overrun – underscored by the burst of the Japanese economic bubble – Tomcat’s was completed in 1992. But when the movie’s production/distribution company went bankrupt, plans to release it were shelved indefinitely; its theatrical run didn’t ever happen, with its only screenings being in small, local venues plus a handful of showings on regional TV. Even animators in the industry often hadn’t heard of its existence, and it began to be called a “phantom” or “fabled” (幻 maboroshi) work – as this translator puts it, “something so fantastic, rare and mysterious that its very existence has come into question”.
Nearly 20 years later, an individual named Mitsuhiro Akashi learned of the film through a friend of his who held the copyright, having inherited the rights from her late father who had invested in the work. Akashi and the friend began promoting the film online which reinvigorated fan interest, and resulted in a screening event hosted by Manabu Ōhashi in late 2012. This (presumably) caught the attention of Tollywood – a small, independent/arthouse cinema in Shimokitazawa, Tokyo (where, incidentally, I got to see the great 1987 film Gondola back in 2017) – and they were able to bring Tomcat’s to their theatre at the end of 2014 for a one-month-only engagement (which was then extended another month due to demand).
Akashi also ran a crowdfunding campaign around this time to produce a 35 mm digital remaster of the film, but the Blu-Ray’s distribution was limited to the 225-ish supporters, and it has never appeared online (legally or illegally). The digital version has been shown briefly in a couple venues in Japan (such as at Tollywood again in 2019), once in Switzerland, and once in France, but it’s never been available to publicly purchase or watch at home.
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