In this interview, A New Dawn reveals itself as a film breaking away from tradition while still holding it close, as Yoshitoshi Shinomiya speaks candidly about Makoto Shinkai’s influence, the uneasy rise of AI, and a fading rural world suspended between memory and change.
With the only animated feature in the competition section of the 76th Berlinale, Japanese writer-director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya feels surreal to be part of the film festival. “I wasn’t sure if we would finish the film in time for the deadline… but we made it… We are here!” Speaking to Film Fest Report, Shinomiya talks about his debut animated feature, his love for painting, and protecting the environment.
A traditional Japanese artist with an immense interest in the environment is rare for a filmmaker or an animator, but Shinomiya feels that this gives him an edge to tell a story that will highlight reality as we see it.
Having built a reputation as a meticulous visual image maker after working as a collaborator with filmmakers like Makoto Shinkai (films like Kimi no na wa (Your Name.), Kotonoha no niwa (The Garden of Words)), Shinomiya has a lot riding on his shoulders with his directorial debut animation, which looks at a story of tradition and change in today’s world.
The premise Shinomiya built is based on a traditional fireworks factory in a rural town that faces eviction and the loss of a traditional art to redevelopment. It is a story of three friends attempting to keep the already dysfunctional fireworks factory alive. The film revolves around the slow-dying art of fireworks amidst the changing scenario of redevelopment, environmental changes, and community living.
Shinomiya felt drawn to tell this story when his young daughter’s comment on seeing the glistening sea from afar made him think of how children perceive the changing landscape, of seeing through the solar panels and finding hidden colours and patterns.
“In Japan,” he explains, “solar panels have started to be seen not just as green technology but as a force of landscape destruction, particularly in rural areas where large installations are carved into hillsides. The boom after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, when the country sought to move away from nuclear energy, created new scars on the land even as it promised a cleaner future. People consider it positive because it solves an energy crisis,” he says, “but at the same time it changes the scenery that formed our memories.”
“Fireworks, by contrast, are not simply leisure or spectacle. In Japan, Hanabi or firework presentations are tied to the OBon festival (a fusion of the ancient Japanese belief in ancestral spirits and a Japanese Buddhist custom to honour the spirits of one’s ancestors, usually held in August, when families remember and console their ancestors), and they also carry a strong association with the end of the Second World War. You could say that for 80 to 100 years, fireworks have held the memory of the war dead and of a culture that nearly disappeared,” he says.
But in the film, that tradition is not abolished by decree but eroded by circumstance. “I don’t think there’s a concept in Japan of banning fireworks,” he answers carefully. “Fireworks are still a religious ritual as much as entertainment, so the idea of legally ending them sits uneasily with that role. Yet the film registers the reality that time, demography and economics can accomplish what law does not: a great tradition fades not with a ban, but with a shrug.”
Visually, the animation of the film, with washed-out colours and soft lines, suggests watercolour sketches that someone kept working over, gently erasing and redrawing their own childhood. Shinomiya describes himself first and foremost as a hand-drawn animator; his style, he says, evolved slowly from a desire to preserve the texture of traditional Japanese animation while refusing the heavy emphasis on light and shadow that dominates mainstream anime.
“I wanted the colours and lines of traditional Japanese art, not the volumetric shading you see everywhere now,” he explains. The result is a visual world where contours feel fragile and slightly blurred, as if the image could disappear at any moment, an apt match for a story about a community on the verge of vanishing.
His path also runs through the work of Makoto Shinkai, on whose breakout film Kimi no na wa he worked. Seeing Shinkai make an entire short digitally, alone at a computer, was “a shock” and a motivation: “For our generation he was like a superstar, proof that you could build a whole animated world yourself.” Shinomiya is candid about “stealing” from Shinkai, not only in terms of technique but in the way personal emotion can be routed through genre.
Given that reverence for the handmade, the question of AI is inevitable. Whereupon the animator in Shinomiya reveals he has already been encouraged to use AI tools, for instance to generate backgrounds when a production is behind schedule. He hesitated, not out of nostalgia alone, but because he locates the essence of animation in the movement of the animator’s hand.
“At the moment, AI is not at a level where it can really produce the kind of high-quality animation I need,” he says, but he’s frank that this might change. If AI ever reaches that level, he isn’t sure how he’ll react; he only knows that for him, the trace of the human hand is where his strength lies.
Then he takes the argument a step further, toward something like philosophy. Animation, he suggests, is historically tied to animism — to the human act of projecting life into the non-living, of seeing spirit in nature and objects. “If AI, something non-human, starts creating animated worlds from its own perspective, can we still call that ‘animation’ in the same sense?” he asks. It’s not a rejection so much as an open question about authorship and perspective: what happens when the “soul” in a moving image no longer comes from human longing but from code.
His own daughter offers a clue to how quickly perceptions are shifting. When she watches animation on television, she is genuinely surprised to hear that humans drew it; for her generation, the idea that machines might create such images is already the default. “Maybe this is only a question for our generation,” he says with a small smile. “For them, it may not matter who draws it, as long as it moves.”
“I’m not young anymore, so I can’t claim to know everything about youth,” he laughs. When he returns to his hometown, he still hears stories, still feels that continuity, so he believes it can exist. But he is clear-eyed: it’s probably more natural now that people drift apart. In the past, distance plus the lack of communication tools made separation final; today, social media ensures it is almost impossible to truly cut ties.
“You might feel far from your hometown,” he says, “but you’re always one message away from everyone.” That ambivalence — permanent connectivity, fragile intimacy — threads through the film’s depiction of friendship. It is not a nostalgic plea to “go back” to some ideal past, but a recognition that even as rural communities dissolve, new forms of connection are emerging that are less visible, but no less real.
The slow hollowing-out of rural Japan as jobs vanish and young people leave is central to the film. “When I was young, I desperately wanted to escape my hometown and go to the city,” he admits. “Now, with my own children, I understand how much support a community gives.” New Dawn stages that realisation by placing a group of kids at the point where their village festival, their friendships and their landscape all begin to slip away.
Formally, he has long experimented with mixing live action, animation and other techniques in short commercials and music videos; with this film, he extends that hybrid approach, with the use of stop-motion passages. The sequences in the film were produced in France and then integrated into the 2D world, a process that turned out to be more complex than expected, down to details such as the size of a mahjong set prop that had to be sourced from China. “It was a big challenge to control the gestures across distance,” he says, but also an extension of what he sees as his specialty: combining different visual languages until they feel like one.
As for the fictitious name Shuuhari for the fireworks, he confirms it comes from a traditional Japanese concept describing three stages of mastery: obeying the rules, breaking them, and finally transcending them. It’s hard to think of a more fitting signature for a filmmaker whose first feature is precisely about that hinge moment — between countryside and city, ritual and regulation, hand-drawn line and algorithm — when an old world ends and a new one has not quite begun.
Our team is on the ground at the 76th Berlin International Film Festival, running from February 12th to 22nd, 2026.
