One Punch Man’s Original Director Will Unleash His Dazzling New Sci-Fi Movie in 6 Months — Polygon

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One Punch Man’s Original Director Will Unleash His Dazzling New Sci-Fi Movie in 6 Months — Polygon | AIPROPX

on Google Preferred Source Google News Link copied to clipboard By Ryan Epps Published Aug 16, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT FYI A new kind of strange from one of anime’s boldest directors

The Mandalorian and Grogu gets Disney Plus release date You need to play 2024’s best hidden-gem action game on PS Plus and Game Pass 5 brilliant anime that don’t waste a single episode One Punch Man’s original director will unleash his dazzling new sci-fi movie in 6 months Sonny Boy Sign in to your Polygon.com account There are few anime directors whose names alone cast so much appeal for a new project. After helping define the anarchic energy of One-Punch Man ’s first season and creating the surreal, deeply introspective Sonny Boy , Shingo Natsume is finally taking his particular brand of strange to the big screen with his first original feature film that looks positively mesmerizing.

Ghost: End of Night is a mysterious science-fiction anime set in a near-future world where humanity no longer needs to work. At the center of it is Nike (Mayu Hotta), a 15-year-old girl who is increasingly dissatisfied with the comfortable, orderly world around her. She becomes obsessed with finding something “real.” The film’s first few teasers, the latest of which was released on Thursday, Aug. 6, offer little in the way of conventional plot details, instead surrounding Nike with starry skies, dreamlike imagery, and a sense that something wondrous (and potentially terrifying) is hiding just beneath the surface.

While 2027 is stacked with some of the most anticipated anime in years, from Kagurabachi to LONA , Ghost: End of Night is one of the more intriguing upcoming projects to keep an eye on, especially if you came away from Sonny Boy wondering what Natsume might do with an original feature film.

Natsume has spent much of his career proving that he can bring a distinctive sensibility to other creators' worlds. He directed the first season of One-Punch Man , ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. , Boogiepop and Others (a fantastic anime for horror fans), and The Tatami Time Machine Blues , among other incredible projects. While each offers an interesting side of the director’s core visual chic, Sonny Boy is the finest distillation of what happens when Natsume is allowed to build a world all his own.

The 2021 series stranded a group of high school students in a bizarre alternate dimension, using its supernatural premise to explore loneliness, adolescence, free will, and the strange process of adulting. It was deliberately elusive, visually inventive, and often more interested in a character’s internal strife than in providing easy answers to the overarching questions governing its world.

Ghost: End of Night seems poised to continue that tradition, but with a very different premise. In the virtual reality network known as the Orthoverse, emotions can be visualized. Nike, who manages the virtual network’s “starry sky,” encounters an emotion called “Flower” floating through Orthoverse's starry sky and dismisses it as trash. That strange detail seemingly digs at one of the central ideas surrounding the film: What happens when something as messy and intangible as a human feeling can be made visible, given a name, and discarded?

The film’s title furthers that idea, too. On the official website , Natsume describes Ghost: End of Night as a story of “despair and prayer,” following a 15-year-old girl as she falls “to the depths of the night” while reaching toward “beautiful things that are truly there” in the darkness. He says the film is ultimately meant to stir the contradictory emotions that everyone keeps hidden deep inside themselves.

Much like Sonny Boy before it, Ghost sounds less like a straightforward sci-fi adventure and more like an emotional rollercoaster wrapped in a stunning human mystery. Natsume has assembled an especially promising team to capture that vision, including ACCA character designer Natsume Ono providing original character designs and Madhouse — Natsume’s longtime collaborator and the renowned studio behind Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End , Perfect Blue , and Monster — animating the project.

Alternative rock band Hitsujibungaku (羊文学) provided six original songs for the movie, including the insert song “Sugar,” while musician Ohzora Kimishima composed the score in his first anime film-scoring role following his professional music debut. The entire score is being produced around the movie itself rather than simply dropped over the scenes afterward, reminiscent of sonic-fueled anime classics like FLCL and Cowboy Bebop . In a comment posted to X , Hitsujibungaku wrote in Japanese (translated into English), “I read the script over and over, and by the end, I was always in tears.”

For Sonny Boy fans, the combination of visuals and music is especially exciting. Natsume has already shown how effectively audio, animation, and ambiguous storytelling can work together to turn an anime into something that feels more like a mood you inhabit than a story you simply sit and watch. Ghost: End of Night looks every bit ready to take that same philosophy into the stratosphere, and given that most trailers have mostly been roughly 30 seconds long, the film is set to be ripe with surprises.

One-Punch Man’s Original Director Is Making a Mesmerizing Sci-Fi Movie Ghost: End of Night is scheduled to premiere in Japanese theaters on Feb. 11, 2027. There is currently no U.S. theatrical release date or streaming platform announced for the movie, so North American viewers will have to wait for more information about its international distribution at a later date. Polygon has reached out to Madhouse for further clarification. The film will also feature a manga adaptation ahead of its theatrical release, giving fans another avenue to enter Natsume’s strange new world. The adaptation is scheduled to begin serialization in the September issue of Young Ace , which hits store shelves in Japan later this month.

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