Cocoon, a wartime manga by Kyo Machiko, is getting an anime adaptation. The adaptation is set to air in the summer of 2025, and NHK will be producing and broadcasting the series. A teaser visual has been released as well.
Studio Sasayuri will be animating the series, while Hitomi Tateno, a former Studio Ghibli animator who worked on titles such as My Neighbor Totoro (1988) to When Marnie Was There (2014), will serve as the animation producer. NHK also pointed out that the anime is set to air in time for the 80th anniversary of the ending of the Pacific War during World War II.
Cocoon by Kyo Machiko was serialized in Akita Shoten’s Elegance Eve from its May 2009 to July 2010. All 15 chapters were compiled into a single tankobon volume that was released in August 2010. The manga was selected for the Jury Selections of the 14th Manga Division Jury Selections by the Japan Media Arts Festival. The plot follows teen girls who attend an elite all-girls school in Okinawa. World War II breaks out and they are forced to become nurses. Japan Media Arts listing for the manga states that “this manga should provide an opportunity for readers who have not experienced the war to talk about the past, and make the readers feel that this is a story of their own.”
Kyo Machiko started her manga career when she started publishing one-page comics online back in 2004, which were later compiled into a book called Sennen Gaho, published in 2008. Her 2013 manga, Mitsuami no Kami-sama, won the Tezuka Osamu Cultural Prize’s New Artist Prize and was later adapted into a short film by Production I.G. Overseas, the anime film was titled Pigtails.
In an interview with The Comic Journal, following the release of her COVID-19-related comics Distance My #stayhome Diary and Essential My #stayhome Diary 2021-2022, Kyo Machiko said that she aims to continue depicting the ordinary lives of people to resonate with them, as well as convey the message of all people being indispensable to each other.
I would like to continue to create works while moving back and forth between the big swell of society and very familiar landscapes. Hopefully, I will have something that can be read and reread over a long period of time, one year, ten years, fifty years, a hundred years… and delivered to the reader at that moment in time.
Quote from Kyo Machiko
Source: NHK Press Release
© Kyo Machiko (Akita Shoten) / NHK NEP
