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Born in 1975, Makoto Sasaki’s first documentary film Fragment came out in 2006 and achieved a long run of three years including screenings in the U.S. and Germany. Other titles include Innervision (2013), Minorities And Sex: Strictly Personal Way Of Love (2015), See the Light (2018), A Kid on the Alley of Atami is included in the omnibus film Play Room (2018). Many of his works focus on the boundaries between the majority and the minority.

Hideyuki Kato was born in Tokyo in 1977 and currently lives in Tokyo. He is congenitally blind. He serves as a system engineer, and a musician (E-bass guitar). He is a member of the band, celcle. He occasionally composes songs. Kato made appearance in the film innervision. He works as a lecturer at an international preschool. His hobbies include cooking, crafting, and works that require precise skills to the extent that cause you a headache.

As a curator, Miyuki Tanaka...

Four-year-old Kun is an only child — this is, until his parents bring home a baby sister named Mirai (the Japanese word for future) and the boy gets rattled by the new addition to the household. Not much there for a full-length feature film … or so you’d think. Except you are in the presence of Japanese animation artist Mamoru Hosoda (Wolf Children, Summer Wars), who again transforms the seemingly conventional into a magic carpet ride of time and memory. It makes all the difference.

Released in an English-dubbed version, Mirai...

Gkids has amassed 10 nominations for Best Animated Feature across seven of the nine Oscar ceremonies since the company was founded in 2008. The American film distributor has usually been nominated for films not favored for nominations and always for films that gross under $1 million at the domestic box office; the most recent was last year’s international co-production “The Breadwinner,” which won the Annie Award for Best Animated Feature (Independent). Gkids has never won the Oscar, but it trails only Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures among film distributors in Best Animated Feature nominations in the last decade, and it could add another one in January.

SEEPixar could go on a Best Animated Feature winning streak.

Gkids’s slate this year includes “Fireworks,” “Lu Over the Wall,” “Mfkz” and “The Night Is Short, Walk on Girl,” all from Japan. Its most critically acclaimed contender is “Mirai,” which boasts 100 percent approval on Rotten Tomatoes,...

After such expansive fantasies as “Wolf Children” and “Summer Wars,” Japanese animation master Mamoru Hosoda delivers a story of such intimate, unpretentious simplicity, you’d hardly recognize it as coming from the ambitious visionary behind those films. And yet “Mirai” — which inventively depicts the way a young boy’s world is turned upside down by the arrival of a baby sister — could not have been made by anyone else. It’s the work of a true auteur (in what feels like his most personal film yet) presented as innocuous family entertainment.

Who but Hosoda could have imagined a scenario — every bit as enchanted as Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol,” though entirely original in its own right — in which four-year-old Kun comes to accept his initially unwelcome sister via a series of hallucinatory visitations from other members of his family: past (his war-hero grandfather and decades-younger mother), present (an anthropomorphic version...