*We don’t know the official spellings of the names yet. This is our best guess using the Japanese pronunciations. We will fix the spellings once we have official names!

With Sayonara no Asa ni Yakusoku no Hana wa Kazarou (SayoAsa for short) Mari Okada will have her directorial debut. She is also known for writing the screenplay of Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day. The new movie is introducing us to the characters in more detail, through the release of some character illustrations.

The main character is Maquia, who is an Eloph, a creature who stops growing in their teens but keep living for hundreds of years. She doesn’t have parents and when troops of another country attack her country she loses her friends and home, which leaves her wandering a dark forest where she finds a baby without parents. Maquia, who remains the same girl even as the clock ticks by, raises the baby boy she named Erial, and the story of their irreplaceable time together will be told in this movie.

The character illustrations introduce most of the important characters, starting with Maquia. Maquia (voiced by Manaka Iwami) looks like a little girl but as an Eloph she will live for several hundred years. She looks like a quiet girl but has a strong heart. While she was escaping the attack of the Mezarte army, who are after the Elophs’ blood in search of longevity, she finds a baby boy and decides to become his mother. Erial (voiced by Miyu Irino) is the human child Maquia picked up. When the village is attacked by bandits, he is the only one who survives.

Other characters introduced are the Eoph girl Leilia (VA: Ai Kayano), the boy Krim (VA: Yuki Kaji) and the eldest Lashine (VA: Miyuki Sawashiro). Not forgetting the owner of the farm Maquia arrives at when she’d just met Erial, Mido (VA: Rina Sato) as well as the Mezarte soldier Izol (VA: Tomokazu Sugita) and the ever-traveling Baro (VA: Hiroaki Hirata). We can’t wait to see how all these characters will interact with the two lonely hearts of Maquia and Erial.

SayoAsa will start screening in cinemas all over Japan starting 24 February 2018.

source: https://animeanime.jp/article/2018/01/23/36567.html