Cocoon Director, Producer, & Kensuke Ushio Talk World War II Anime Movie | Interview
Cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood is Sasayuri’s debut feature, which was founded by Studio Ghibli animator Hitomi Tateno. Director Yukimitsu Ina, Tateno, and composer Kensuke Ushio spoke with ComingSoon about the film and its adaptation from the acclaimed manga. GKIDS’ World War II anime movie arrives in theaters on September 4, 2026.
“San and Mayu attend an all-girls school on a warm and tranquil island. When war reaches their shores, they are ordered to help nurse the wounded in a military hospital hidden away in a cave. Amidst escalating death and brutality, the friends struggle to find solace in their fragile lives,” says the official synopsis.
Tyler Treese: Yukimitsu, the original manga is very explicit with its violence. In the anime, we see flowers take the place of blood, and some of the nastier scenes are left to the imagination. Can you speak to that choice and finding the right way to artistically translate the story into animation?
Yukimitsu Ina: I think the first thing that was really important to me was how watchable, how easy to watch this film was going to be. I didn’t want any wartime gloominess or grotesqueness. I didn’t want to sell this film through shock value. I really wanted them to be sold on the storytelling of this film.
Especially, I wanted teenagers or my generation and maybe a little younger people to watch this film. That was one important aspect of interpreting the gory manga to this anime.
The second thing is the expression. I really didn’t want to express everything I wanted to say with the film. I think lately there’s a trend where there’s a clear message about what films give, but I really didn’t want to go that way.
I really wanted the audience to interpret the movie in their own way and also give them those empty parts to imagine, use their imagination to think about what the message was of this film, what they would feel.
It was a really hard, difficult thing to include these elements of not filling in all the blanks for them, but I really thought it was worth it. I think it’s a more rewarding watch as a result.
Tyler Treese: Hitomi, in the manga, all the men are just sketches. They aren’t fully detailed, but in the film, they’re drawn normally. Could you speak to that change? Did you feel like it would confuse viewers, or what led to that?
Hitomi Tateno: It’s not something that I decided alone. It was really important to show that these girls are in such a horrific, stern situation. So if the soldiers are too blurred out or censored, you won’t feel the tension of the wartime seriousness of how many people are in the cave, et cetera.
But we did make it so you can’t really tell what their faces actually look like. So if the girls were to describe one soldier, they wouldn’t be able to.
It’s not like the soldiers were there because they wanted to be either, just like the girls. So it’s not like we wanted to make one soldier into a bad guy or anything.
But it was really important, situation-wise. We had to depict some elements of how hard the war was and how hard the situation was.
Tyler Treese: Kensuke, this is most like your score from A Silent Voice. In that film, a microphone was placed inside a piano, so you get to hear all the mechanical sounds of the piano moving. I thought that also kind of fit in with the cocoon theme here. Did you do anything similar, or how did you try to evoke the themes of Cocoon with your score?
Kensuke Ushio: Yeah, I really think as an end result, it might look similar, and of course you would feel that way. But the concept that came from it and the process that I went through was actually really different between the two films.
I think for A Silent Voice, I wanted to include the noise or the extra noise of the sounds. The world is beautiful, but then there are these sounds, right? So that’s why I put the microphone in the piano.
But for Cocoon, I really wanted to focus on how this horrific, serious situation is really related to the world that we live in now.
So I wanted maybe someone who had played a piano before, or who knows how a piano operates, for a piano to be close to them. I would include the shuffling noises of the piano keyboards tapping, et cetera.
In that way, when the audience hears the sound or hears the music or hears the score, it’s a really relatable sound. That’s the kind of method that I used when composing for this film.
So yeah, the end result might look similar, but really the process, the thought, and the concept are pretty different.
Tyler Treese: Yukimitsu, this aired in Japan as a television special. What was your biggest takeaway from seeing this out in the world and getting to see the response from viewers?
Yukimitsu Ina: Well, I don’t know if I can say it was well received, but there were quite a few people who said that it left an impression on them. There were people around me who said yes.
Tyler Treese: Hitomi, it’s very easy to compare Cocoon to Grave of the Fireflies, which is a film I love but can’t bring myself to rewatch very often. Yukimitsu mentioned wanting to make this watchable, and animated films are often rewatched so much. So how important was it to make sure this message was impactful and resonated upon the very first watch here?
Hitomi Tateno: When I was a child, there were a lot of wartime manga and movies, and I wasn’t really fond of them. Of course, at that time, when I was younger, they were shown a lot and depicted as educational, like, “Let’s not do this again.”
I think now there’s not so much of that push to show wartime films during the summer. But when I was a child, every summer there were always a lot of things.
I think Grave of the Fireflies is a very wonderful film, and I would watch it many times. But it’s true that a lot of people think that it’s stressful.
I’ve always wanted to make a film that people would want to rewatch or want to revisit the protagonists in a wartime film.
I used to always think, “How can I make it so that the audience would want to come back to the girls who had a hard life, who scattered as flowers?”
I really think all the staff thought that way. So it was really important to us to depict it in this way.
Tyler Treese: Kensuke, as you mentioned, you wanted to lean into the very serious subject matter here, and your score is more atmospheric and delicate as a result. Can you speak to your range? Because we saw this in the Chainsaw Man movie where you got to be more bombastic, but there are also very delicate and softer parts to the score and Reze as well. Do you feel like you’ve really gotten to show your full range lately as a musician?
Kensuke Ushio: It’s really difficult to explain.
I do think people would say, “Oh yeah, this Cocoon is very soft and delicate sounds,” whereas with Chainsaw Man, I would go from explosive sounds to very soft sounds too, and I think that dynamic range is too much.
I also think any project where I could use my full range is very limited. I do get that a lot. Everyone, when they talk to me, will be like, “Wow, you have this full range of doing this versus this versus this.”
But actually, what I’m doing with every project is pretty much the same in all the work I do. I have a concept, and then just come up with the music from that concept for each project.
I don’t know if this is answering your question, but I like to think of myself as a coffee filter, where depending on the beans that you put in, you’ll get a different flavor.
Thanks to Yukimitsu Ina, Hitomi Tateno, and Kensuke Ushio for taking time to speak about Cocoon – One Summer of Girlhood.
Source: Comingsoon.net