On April 14th, 2025, the North American premiere of a rare anime film happened in the historic Texas Theatre in Dallas, Texas. While this statement might not seem huge at first glance, if you know a bit of anime history, this is indeed quite an important event.
For those not in the know, a little history lesson is in order. Chibineko Tom no Daibouken, better known as Tomcat’s Big Adventure online, is an anime film released in 1992 that had a pretty rough production history. In a nutshell: the story goes that after five years of production, the movie’s theatrical release was canceled due to their distribution company going bankrupt (as this was around the time of Japan’s Bubble Economy finally bursting), leading to only a few scattered showings in small venues and supposedly a handful of regional Japanese TV airings. This was a tragedy, as even though Tomcat’s Big Adventure is a kids movie, it was produced with an incredible A-list of staff & cast: The film was the directorial debut of the late Ryutaro Nakamura, who anime fans probably know better as the director of Serial Experiments Lain. Character designer and Animation director Manabu Ohashi might be better known to some as Mao Lamdo, the creator of the Cloud short in cult-favorite Robot Carnival, not to mention his gorgeous key animation in projects like The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, his work on the Space Adventure Cobra opening, and the second ending theme to Sailor Moon, “Moon Princess”, just to name a few. Music for the film was scored by the great Kenji Kawai of the original Ranma ½ and Ghost in the Shell fame. Key animators included such talents as Koichi Arai (Akira, Macross Plus, Sailor Moon R: The Movie) and Toshiyuki Inoue (Kiki’s Delivery Service, Venus Wars, Memories short Magnetic Rose). The voice cast includes heavy-hitters like the late Toshiko Fujita (Rui in Cat’s Eye, Taichi in Digimon Adventure) as Tom, Masako Nozawa (Son Goku in Dragon Ball, Tetsuro in Galaxy Express 999) as Mark, Minami Takayama (Kiki in Kiki’s Delivery Service, Conan in Great Detective Conan/Case Closed) as Alex, Akio Otsuka (Batou in Ghost in the Shell, the title character of Black Jack) as Leonis…As you can see, almost every person involved, I could write an entire article JUST on them and their career accomplishments. That’s how impressive this movie’s DNA is.
So it’s no surprise that for years, the film was held in high regard as a thing of legend–some folks in the anime industry even wondered if it truly existed at all, given how few people had ever seen the finished film. But fast-forward 20 years later, an individual named Mitsuhiro Akashi discovered one of their friends actually owned the copyright to the fabled long-lost film, through her late father who had invested in the production. The duo decided to promote the film online, not only leading to online interest from anime fans, but to small theater showings in Japan and eventually a successful Japanese crowdfunding to remaster the film back in 2015. As of this writing, the only blurays of the film that exist are the now sold-out ones that Japanese backers to this campaign could get, and the film isn’t streaming online (legally or otherwise).
And now, you have a better understanding as to just why getting to see Tomcat’s Big Adventure is a pretty big deal!
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