By late June, the heat left behind by the finale of Re:Zero had begun, little by little, to fade.
With July approaching, the flagship anime projects from Tokyo's four major networks once again became the center of attention among Japanese anime fans. At the same time, the Southern Shikoku Alliance's July original production, I Was Somehow Treated as a Hero, but I Refuse to Accept Moral Blackmail, also drew attention for a rather unexpected reason.
The title was ridiculous. To be honest, the plot was not much better: an isekai fantasy built for easy satisfaction, with little logic and plenty of convenience. Even so, because it had taken over the Friday eight p.m. slot left vacant by Re:Zero, it became one of the most discussed new releases among the heavily promoted anime backed by the major networks.
That was how the anime industry worked. Once one series ended, fans would inevitably turn their eyes toward the next new title.
But in the offline merchandise market, Re:Zero was still the undisputed king of the moment.
Sora no longer needed to spend money on advertising or force publicity through sheer volume. Re:Zero merchandise was always the most visible in stores, placed on the best shelves and stocked in the largest quantities. Wherever there was an anime section, those products were there, as though the series were still airing at full strength.
Naturally, that situation - one single work devouring all the meat while the others could barely sip the broth - stirred envy, admiration, and resentment among many people in the industry.
An eighteen-year-old high school dropout had, in just one year, turned fifty episodes of a single work into a fortune large enough to place him among the wealthy names of Japan's anime business.
Who would not turn red-eyed at that?
Those feelings were beginning to gather quietly.
And it was around this time that certain people connected to Tokyo's four major networks began hearing rumors that Sora's company was producing two new TV anime, both planned for broadcast the following January.
In a company with hundreds of employees, information like that could not be guarded as if everyone worked for a national security bureau. Sooner or later, something would leak.
July arrived, bringing summer with it.
Mirage, Summer Wind, Sprinter, and several other big-budget animated films for the holiday season began releasing their final trailers one after another before their theatrical premieres.
Together with Five Centimeters per Second, those four works had total investments surpassing several billion yen. Their distributors were now locked in a full-scale battle with cinema chains, theater operators, and screening managers across Japan, using cash, revenue-sharing promises, and every possible commercial advantage as weapons to negotiate, inch by inch, the percentage of screenings they would receive on opening day.
If a film only received evening showtimes, it would lose every viewer available during the day.
The opposite was also true.
If a movie did not have a ten a.m. screening, for example, why would someone free at that hour sit around in the cinema waiting until eleven? It was only a movie, not a girlfriend. Nobody would wait that long.
They would simply watch whatever was available at the time.
That was why, if a film wanted a strong opening box office, it could not afford to fall too far behind in the initial fight for screening share.
And all of that cost money.
Sora hated this kind of practice - spending fortunes to open doors, buy influence, and negotiate access through hidden channels. But there was not much he could do. This, too, was part of the market.
Spending one billion yen producing a film and then twice that amount on promotion, connections, and competition for showtimes was practically an industry norm. A person could despise that behavior. They could choose to pour the entire budget into the quality of the work and try to win through content and word of mouth alone. The price, most of the time, was getting crushed by competitors, ending up with empty screening rooms and a miserable box office.
On July fourth, the final pre-release trailer for Five Centimeters per Second was released across the internet, as well as through the Southern Shikoku Alliance's channels, Sora's main broadcast partner.
The video lasted only one minute and three seconds.
At the very beginning, pale pink cherry blossom petals drifted slowly across the screen. The image quality was so delicate, so meticulous, that for a moment many viewers could not even tell whether they were looking at reality or animation.
A boy and a girl, both still in middle school, ran along a slope covered in falling sakura.
A gust of wind passed through the scene. Petals scattered through the air. The girl's hair fluttered softly, strands falling out of place, while the boy, breathing hard, kept his eyes fixed on her from across the path.
Animation was like that: every yen invested appeared on screen.
Ordinary viewers might not be able to explain the technical details of the visual quality, but the overall feeling was completely different.
A low-budget anime could never produce hair movement that delicate, that precise, that consistent with physical motion. And it was not only the hair. The leaves in the background swayed with the wind. Even the wires stretched between the utility poles trembled with a faint, natural rhythm.
This kind of animation was extremely difficult.
In most cheap productions, everything moved carelessly. The heroine opened and closed her mouth without the lip movement matching the dialogue, the background remained frozen like a still illustration, and the artificiality pulled the viewer straight out of the story.
In Five Centimeters per Second, however, every second had twenty-four frames. The number of key drawings used in the same amount of time was more than double that of an ordinary Japanese TV anime.
Add to that the breathtakingly beautiful backgrounds, almost unreasonable in their refinement, and there was only one word that could describe the experience.
Stunning.
"It would be nice if we could see the cherry blossoms together again next year."
Beneath the falling flowers, the girl held a red umbrella and spun once, smiling at the boy on the other side of the tracks.
It lasted only a few seconds.
Even so, countless fans found themselves frozen in front of the screen.
That scent of youth, that explosive visual quality...
As expected of a work directed by Sora.
The logo of Five Centimeters per Second slowly appeared.
Then, a gentle and sorrowful melody began to play.
It was the film's classic background track, Memories of Distant Days.
At that moment, many viewers felt a faint sting in their chests. The music was simply too melancholic.
But Re:Zero had given them confidence. After all, in that anime, no one had truly died.
Heh.
Kantoku Sora, we already know your style.
This film would definitely be the kind where the journey felt depressing in the middle, but the ending healed everything - warm, gentle, and comforting.
In the segment Cherry Blossom Fragment, the heroine walked through the snow beside the boy.
Under the cherry tree, the bare winter branches bloomed only in their imagination, transforming into a magnificent spring vision.
Then came the protagonist in high school, pushing his bicycle alone ahead, while another girl behind him hesitated with an uneasy expression, as though gathering the courage to approach him.
There was the rocket rising into the sky, its white exhaust trail tearing through the twilight with almost unreal beauty.
There was the adult protagonist after graduation, working in the great city of Tokyo, his eyes hollow from loneliness and from the inability to truly let anyone enter his heart.
There were also the train tracks - the same tracks where, as children, the two had promised to watch the cherry blossoms together.
And there were two people crossing past each other on those tracks, moving in opposite directions.
The logo of Five Centimeters per Second appeared once more.
In a trailer of only one minute, the heroine's wish to see the cherry blossoms again next year was the only spoken line.
Even so, through a sequence of images filled with intent, carefully composed story cuts, and smooth transitions, Japanese anime fans reached a clear conclusion.
If this work could maintain that level of animation from beginning to end, then even without discussing the story, the visual experience alone would already be worth the ticket price.
That was, after all, the purpose of a movie trailer.
Images, effects, music, cast, atmosphere - anything could work. As long as, before release, the audience felt that the film had at least one shining point strong enough to justify entering a dark theater for two hours, the trailer had already fulfilled its mission.
That night, Japan's major otaku forums were once again dominated by topics related to Five Centimeters per Second.
The anime titles scheduled to premiere in July had their spotlight stolen all over again.
That included City Above the Clouds, Seiun TV's flagship anime for the season, whose first episode had aired that very night.
After its premiere, the discussion around it was completely crushed by the trailer for Five Centimeters per Second.
Sora's influence in the Japanese anime industry made many professionals feel a chill down their spines.
The fans, on the other hand, did not care about any of that.
Japan's anime industry had already been deeply infected by fandom culture. And Sora possessed a combination of traits that made things even worse for his opponents: he was a young genius, only eighteen years old, handsome, tall, and free of messy scandals.
"It's locked in. Five Centimeters per Second will at least make the top three at the summer box office."
"Use your imagination a little. The investment behind Five Centimeters per Second is already the third highest among the films releasing this summer. Coming third at the box office would be normal, not a victory. The goal has to be at least second place. Maybe even first."
"The problem is that Mirage and Summer Wind have casts that are way too strong. Award-winning actors on one side, award-winning actresses on the other. Kantoku Sora is famous in the anime world, sure, but if you add up the fans of those actors, there are definitely more of them than his fans. Beating those two films at the box office will be hard."
"Heh. Before losing to Re:Zero, Tokyo's four major networks had that same arrogance. And now? Are they still arrogant? Cinema depends on the quality of the work, not the popularity of the creator. If Five Centimeters per Second is good enough, it can knock down every award-winning actor and actress in its way."
"Exactly. Among the top twenty films in Japan's box office rankings, four are animated films. In the top ten, two are animated as well. And the highest-grossing animated film ranks fifth overall. Stop belittling yourselves for no reason. The ceiling for animated films is extremely high."
"Come on, the movie is still half a month away. Why are you all arguing about this now? The future shouldn't be predicted."
"But I just don't want Kantoku Sora to do badly. Right now, his haters are being suppressed by Re:Zero's results and don't dare show their faces. If this movie's box office is bad, those vermin will go insane with joy."
"I don't really care about that. What worries me is that Kantoku Sora supposedly invested 1.4 billion yen into this film himself. The distributor, Noriko Animation, added another two hundred million for promotion. Looking at it that way, Five Centimeters per Second needs at least five or six billion yen at the box office just to break even."
"Animated films have merchandise, though. A lot of fans will buy it. In that sense, it's better than live-action. Maybe five billion will already be enough to recover the investment."
"Still, there are way too many films releasing this summer. That five-billion break-even line really doesn't feel safe."
The closer the release date came, the more Sora's fans swung between anticipation and anxiety.
On July tenth, one week before release, the creative teams behind the nine films premiering simultaneously on July seventeenth began, almost at the same time, their final promotional offensives.
Sora appeared on Southern Shikoku Alliance programs for three consecutive days.
Meanwhile, the award-winning actors and actresses from competing films took turns appearing on variety shows across Tokyo's four major networks.
A series of behind-the-scenes clips from the films also began to be released alongside those programs.
Everywhere, hosts praised the performances as if they were miracles. They said the actors had surpassed themselves, that improvisations during filming had stunned the Kantokus, that one performer had worn a T-shirt in winter for a scene, another had worn a heavy coat in the heat, another had lost dozens of kilograms for a role, and another had injured a finger during shooting but, instead of going to the hospital, had simply put on a bandage and kept filming.
In only two days, this kind of publicity spread throughout every circle of movie fans.
To be honest, promotional tricks were the same in any world.
Sora could not quite understand what was so impressive about actors earning tens or hundreds of millions of yen and putting in that sort of effort. Was that not the bare minimum? What was there to praise? What was there to be moved by? If they could not even do that much, how could they justify the money they were paid?
Overall, however, Japanese movie fans were still a little more rational than the ones in Sora's previous life. In the end, they looked at the quality of the film. If the work was good, they would naturally praise it after leaving the theater. If it was bad, they would criticize it without mercy.
The problem was that actor fandoms were easily inflamed. As the premiere drew closer, they began attacking every rival of their idols indiscriminately.
And Sora, inevitably, became one of their targets.
Of course, Sora's fans were not made of paper either. Joining forces with Yumi's fans and ordinary viewers who loved animation, they managed to withstand the attacks in online discourse without falling behind.
Mutual resentment, however, was unavoidable.
Four days before the premiere, besides the television networks, websites across Japan and writers connected to various media companies also entered the battlefield.
Some had been paid to praise without restraint.
Others were genuinely analyzing the summer film market with seriousness.
Truth and lies mixed together. And naturally, on the side of Five Centimeters per Second, Sora had also spent a considerable amount of money hiring teams to boost discussion.
The problem with this kind of internal competition was exactly that.
When everyone bought publicity to glorify themselves and smear others, the practical effect was almost the same as if no one had done anything at all. The only real winners were the paid teams manipulating public opinion.
But for low-budget films without money for such operations, the situation was miserable.
Some films premiering in the same period, with investments of only two or three hundred million yen, were already four days away from release and still barely existed due to a lack of promotional budget. In NatsuYume's movie section, one had to search through a hundred threads just to find a single discussion related to them.
They had no heat whatsoever.
To be honest, cooperating with Noriko Animation in this battle of promotion and public opinion over the past few days exhausted Sora several times more than producing anime.
Even so, his objective had been achieved, if only barely.
Cinema chains were also watching the strength of producers and distributors.
After the sequence of moves made by Sora and Noriko Animation, it could not be said that Five Centimeters per Second had surpassed its three main competitors in pre-release popularity.
But it had not fallen behind either.
Only after seeing that level of discussion and public interest were cinema chain managers willing to grant Five Centimeters per Second a 15% share of opening-day screenings.
Cinema chains were driven by profit too. If no one was talking about a film before release, why would a theater reserve a screening room for it?
If only three or four people attended a showing, the exhibitor's share would not even cover the electricity and cleaning costs.
In the end, Five Centimeters per Second's position in the screening lineup landed exactly where expected.
Third place.
No more, no less.
It was the same position it held in the ranking of total investment among the films releasing in the same period.
One could only say that among the works released that summer, there were many projects with stronger capital behind them than Sora had.
The purpose of spending money on promotion was not to get ahead of the competition.
It was to avoid falling behind.
After all, no matter how good the marketing was, it could only trick fans into entering the cinema for the first two days.
If a work truly wanted to achieve a high box office, in the end, it did not depend on whether the cast was famous or whether the promotion had been flawless.
Everything still came back to the quality of the production.
And to the story.
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