For those who have not yet heard, on the 28th April 2013 as part of the Gold Coast Film Festival (Queensland, Australia) – Makoto Shinkai will be holding his world premiere of his latest anime film The Graden of Words, also referred to as Kotonoha no Niwa. This follows the Gold Coast Film Festival also hosting the Australian premiere of his film Children Who Chase Lost Voices From Deep Below which I have covered several times on this site.
While many readers of this site may be familiar with some of his other renown films including The Place Promised in Our Early Days and 5 Centimeters Per Second, I recently stumbled across this video which I haven’t seen for several years. It is an opening sequence he did for the company minori for their visual novel release Haru no Ashioto which originated on the PC in 2004 and was later ported by Alchemist to the Playstation 2 in 2006. Makes for an interesting watch.
Aside from an old translation of the demo, there is no English translation of Haru no Ashioto either officially or by fans and there is no hint as to if this will change in the future. However, while the minori website cannot be accessed outside of Japan at this time, working with translation group No Name Losers and visual novel publisher MangaGamer, they have released one of their visual novels ef – the first tale in English to the international market. If this sounds interesting, you can get more information on the title HERE.
