Netflix began streaming on Tuesday a video message from director Minoru Ōta for the television anime of Hiro Yuki’s Sparks of Tomorrow (20 Seiki Denki Mokuroku) novel:
Image via Sparks of Tomorrow Anime’s website
©Hiro Yuki, Kyoto Animation/Sparks of Tomorrow Production Committee
The anime will debut on July 5 and will air on Sundays at 11:00 p.m. on Tokyo MX and on 11:30 on BS11. The series will also air on ABC TV and TV Aichi. The anime will exclusively stream worldwide on Netflix on Sundays starting on July 5 at 11:00 p.m. JST.
The anime has a world premiere tour with stops in Japan, the U.K., Thailand, and North America. The North American premiere will be at Anime Expo on July 3.
The anime will star:
Minoru Ōta (key animator for Love, Chunibyo & Other Delusions!, Liz and the Blue Bird; episode director for CITY The Animation, Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid S) is directing the anime as his first directorial project. Tatsuhiko Urahata (Haganai, Hi Score Girl, Saki Episode of Side A) is overseeing the series scripts. Kohei Okamura (Free! The Final Stroke chief animation director, Sound! Euphonium key animator) is the chief animation director and character designer. Takaaki Suzuki (Violet Evergarden, Strike Witches) is in charge of the worldview setting, and Hitomi Kotō is composing the music.
Luna Goami performs the opening the song “Eureka Evrika,” and Ginger Root performs the ending theme song “Soarin’.”
Kyoto Animation had announced the anime adaptation in July 2018.
The novel won an honorable mention in the full-length novel category at the 8th Kyoto Animation Awards in May 2017. The entry was the only one to win any of the awards available that year. Kyoto Animation’s KA Esuma Bunko label published the novel in August 2018. Kazumi Ikeda illustrated the novel, and Momoka Nagatani is credited with art and background.
The novel takes place in the summer of 1907, the 40th year of the Meiji era. 15-year-old Inako Momokawa lives in the Fushimi area of Kyoto, and is the second daughter of a sake brewer. Nothing she does ever comes out right, and she receives a scolding from her father every day. Her only relief is the trust she places in her prayers to the gods. One day while at Fushimi Inari shrine, she meets a freewheeling young man named Kihachi Sakamoto. He rejects the gods, and boasts of the incoming age of electricity.
The topic of marriage suddenly comes up in Inako’s household. Her father is one-sidedly making all the decisions for her, and Inako is about to give up hope. It is then that Kihachi draws out Inako’s true feelings of wanting to run away from her family. The only way to stop her marriage is to find an unusual book called the “Electrical Catalog.” The book is a prediction book about electricity that Kihachi wrote when he was a child, but his older brother Seiroku took the book, and its current whereabouts are unknown. Inako and Kihachi together go in search of the book across Kyoto and Shiga prefectures.
Source: Netflix Anime’s YouTube channel
