Anime

Penguin Highway

Hiroyasu Ishida
Japan · 2018 · 118 min
In Japanese with English Subtitles

It’s hard not to love this brightly colored, fantastical, sci-fi adventure, where any number of insanely cute penguins mysteriously begin to appear in a quiet suburban neighborhood. Aoyama is a brainy fourth-grader. Obsessed with experimentation, he is counting down the 4,000 days to his first Nobel prize. He also has a crush on young dental hygienist, or more specifically, an infatuation with her boobs – why do they make him feel different then his mother’s do? (Actually, Aoyama might just be a tad on the spectrum, which would make this more innocent than lecherous. Without social awareness, he is just applying the scientific method to own pre-adolescent hormonal sensations.) It turns out that the dental assistant may have something to do with the penguins, which have been the focus of Aoyama’s most recent research. Meanwhile, his classmate Hamamoto has stumbled upon a discovery of her own. Deep in the forest is a suspended orb of water she’s coined “The Ocean.” Just as the kids begin to uncover the cosmic connection between penguins and the orb, a team of government scientists threaten to ruin everything and plunge the world into disaster.

An ELEVEN ARTS Anime Studio release