“HAUNTING, SUBTLE AND HYPNOTICALLY BEAUTIFUL…” – NEWS OF THE WORLD.

 From Mamoru Oshii, the visionary director of ‘Ghost In The Shell’ and ‘Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence’, comes the full-length animated feature The Sky Crawlers, based on the first of acclaimed author Mori Hiroshi’s five-part series of bestselling novels set in an alternative historical period and chronicling the lives of a group of young aerial fighter pilots involved in a seemingly never-ending war.

The winner of numerous international film awards, including the Future Film Festival Digital Award at the 2008 Venice Film Festival, the Jose Luis Guarner Critics’ Award for Best Film at the 2008 Sitges International Film Festival and the Best Animation Film Award at Tokyo’s Mainichi Film Concours in 2009, The Sky Crawlers takes the groundbreaking techniques of combining traditional 2D and CGI animation developed for Oshii’s earlier features and applies them to a dramatic tale of innocence lost set against a backdrop of spectacular aerial warfare.

A group of eternally young clone-like fighter pilots known as ‘Kildren’ experience the sudden loss of innocence as they are forced to battle it out against their nation’s enemies in astonishing dogfights above the clouds. With his only childhood memory consisting of intense flight training, the fearless teenage pilot, Yuichi Kannami, struggles to discover the secret of his missing past.

When his beautiful, equally young female commander, Suito Kusanagi, is reluctant to discuss the fate of the pilot that Yuichi was brought in to replace - or to acknowledge the strangely perfect condition of that pilot's former aircraft - Yuichi's curiosity becomes ever more heightened and he soon finds himelf questioning not only his purpose in life but also his very own existence.

As visually stunning as one would expect from one of Japan’s finest animation directors, The Sky Crawlers also engages on an intellectual level with a plot that is only fully revealed in the film’s unexpected post-credits sequence.

It will be released on DVD (£19.99) and Blu-ray (£24.99) on 31st May 2010. Special Features include:

DVD

Sky's The Limit: An Interview with Mamoru Oshii; trailers; English and Japanese Stereo and Dolby 5.1 audio options; optional English subtitles.

Blu-ray

Sky's The Limit: An Interview with Mamoru Oshii; The Sound Design and Animation of The Sky Crawlers; Animation Research for The Sky Crawlers; trailers; English and Japanese Stereo and DTS-HD Master Audio options; optional English subtitles.

Press contact: Farhana Shaikh (020 7907 4770)