Director: Hiroyasu Ishida
Release Date: Apr 12, 2019
1 hour 58 minutes
It has opened in several Bay Area locations
Official Site: https://www.elevenarts.net/titles/penguin-highway
Small, cat-size penguins are appearing in the middle of a small-town field…
A critic has called this film “an irresistibly out-there mystery that plays like a cross between Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Stranger Things”…
Variety says, “An impressive first feature from director Hiroyasu Ishida (whose 2011 graduation short, Rain Town, is worth looking up online), Penguin Highway sticks to the big-eyed, fine-limbed aesthetic seen in most adult-targeted anime but fleshes out the characters at the screenplay level, such that the entire enterprise stands apart it’s a notch better even than last year’s Oscar-nominated Mirai.
That the Academy recognized Mirai, making it the first non-Studio Ghibli anime to be nominated, suggests that Americans are slowly embracing the artistic merits of a medium being produced at such a volume that many don’t know where to begin trying to keep up with all that cartoon content.”