The animation studio Production I.G has officially announced Mamoru Oshii's newest directorial effort, The Sky Crawlers film, on Wednesday and revealed its planned 2008 release date. The Sky Crawlers will be Oshii's first fully animated work since 2004's Ghost in the Shell sequel Innocence. (He worked on the Tachigui: The Amazing Lives of the Fast Food Grifters and Open Your Mind hybrid live-action/animation films in the interim.) A short teaser trailer is available on the newly opened website.
The movie is based on a five-volume novel series of the same name by Hiroshi Mori. Mori is a best-selling novelist and manga creator who has sold over 8 million copies of his works. Although he is best known for his scientific mystery stories, he wrote The Sky Crawlers in a different vein by focusing on dogfighting fighter pilots with an emphasis on philosophical passages. The fifth and last volume, Cradle the Sky, will ship on June 25, and a web-serialized short story collection will cross-promote the movie's release.
Mori described this novel series as "the most difficult of all of my works to put onscreen," so he expressed relief upon hearing who was involved. "I heard that the director would be Oshii-san, and I was put at ease right there and then. After all, it's Director Oshii!"
Chihiro Ito will adapt the novels for the film script, and Oshii's frequent collaborator Kenji Kawai (Ghost in the Shell movies, Death Note movies) will compose the soundtrack. Other longtime colleagues include Tetsuya Nishio (Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, Naruto), who will oversee the animation and design the characters, and Atsushi Takeuchi (Ghost in the Shell movies, Appleseed), who will design the mechanics. Warner Brothers will distribute the film in Japan.