Niigata-headquartered tech company NAMICS, which develops and manufactures electrochemical materials, has released an animated brand movie produced by CONTRAIL, the animation planning and production studio-turned-MAPPA brand.

The Sono Kagaku wa, Subete ni Ai o Tsunagu short animation, which follows a man and his robot companion, was storyboarded and directed by Masatsugu Nagasoe, who also created the original character designs. Other staff include Tatsuo Ryuno (Showa Monogatari) as character designer, Yuji Kaneko (Tengoku-Daimkayo, L’étoile de Paris en Fleur) as background art director, and MAPPA president Manabu Otsuka as executive producer.

Sono Kagaku wa, Subete ni Ai o Tsunagu is the latest CONTRAIL-produced short animation to have come out this year, after the Watashi no Obaa-chan-hen commercial for miso company Marukome and the Fukufuku no Chizu promotional anime for Fukushima Prefecture.

CONTRAIL was created in 2019 to produce full-length movies directed by In This Corner of the World/Black Lagoon‘s Sunao Katabuchi, with its first listed credit being production assistance for 2019’s In This Corner (And Other Corners) Of The World, the extended version of Katabuchi’s MAPPA-produced In This Corner Of The World film. In February of this year, it was reported that it would be absorbed by MAPPA; CONTRAIL was previously MAPPA’s affiliated company with Otsuka as its representative director.

CONTRAIL is currently involved with The Mourning Children: Nagiko and The Girls Wearing Tsurubami Black, a new Katabuchi-directed historical film set in Heian era Kyoto, a time when “the city was shrouded in darkness due to repeated epidemics of plague.” 

Source: NAMICS Brand Movie YouTube channel