Housenka Movie Reveals Trailer, Fall 2025 Release Date
The previously announced Housenka (The Last Blossom) movie revealed a new visual and trailer earlier this week. The movie has been officially selected for the Feature Film Competition at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival 2025 and will be premiering in Japan in the fall of 2025. International release dates will be announced later.
Studio CLAP is working on the original movie with Baku Kinoshita (Odd Taxi) as the director and character designer. Kazuya Konomoto, who wrote the Odd Taxi story, is in charge of the original story and screenplay.
The beauty of the blue sky. The brilliance of leaves kissed by sunlight. The quiet meaning behind caring for someone. This film is a reflection on beauty, transience, and the values of happiness—and how these things shape our lives. With a desire to return to the essence of living, I aimed to portray the quiet strength that lies within us as we navigate our ever-changing days.
I truly hope this story reaches many people and gently resonates in their hearts.
- Director Kinoshita
Even in an unrewarded life, we are free to pray. Whether those prayers will ever be answered—we may never know. But still, I wanted to believe. HOUSENKA is the story of a man who has lost the place he once called home, and the silence that lingers between him and his lover. Into that silence, a single flower quietly blooms, giving rise to words that had long withered away. Before the flower could bloom, there were countless moments of silence—and one quiet, unwavering prayer.
I hope that the small certainty born at the end of that long silence and prayer will quietly plant a seed in your heart, too.
- Screenwriter Konomoto
Annecy describes the plot of Housenka movie as:
Autumn 2023. Akutsu, an elderly inmate serving life in prison, is on the verge of a lonely death in his single cell. A flower, touch-me-not, that can talk like humans says to him, “What a rotten life you had.” Through their “conversation”, Akutsu starts reflecting on his past. Summer 1986. Akutsu is living with Nana, a woman six years his junior, and her son Kensuke in a shabby apartment with a garden full of touch-me-nots. A one-night victorious comeback by a dying yakuza, and the story of his family recounted by a flower that blooms in prison.
CLAP previously animated The Tunnel to Summer, the Exit of Goodbyes (2022), Pompo: The Cinéphile (2021), and Kono Sekai no Tanoshimikata: Secret Story (2020).
The project was featured in Annecy 2024’s “Work in Progress” program, where the director Kinoshita appeared alongside producer and the CEO of CLAP Ryoichiro Matsuo, and the concept artist Michinoku Toge. The team gave fans an early look at the movie's vision. The movie has now been completed.
Source: Press Release
© Kazuya Konomoto / The Last Blossom Production Committee
