Director Shuhei Morita , nominated for an Oscar for his work on Katsuhiro Otomo 's Short Peace , has revealed the first short in the series , titled Chō Kidō Gaiku KASHIWA-NO-HA ("Super Mobile Block KASHIWA-NO-HA"). The story is set in 2018 and centers on a family looking for a new home. The family visits an apartment showroom in a complex, and as they travel through the city, they discover that some of the apartment blocks can be transformed into giant robots.
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The building designs are based on the smart city of Kashiwa-no-ha in Chiba Prefecture, with a robot explicitly based on the Ichiban-gai building at the Park City Kashiwa-no-ha campus. For the production of this short, Goki Nakamura served as artistic director, while Daisuke Sajiki designed the characters. The voices of the protagonists will be performed by Yuichi Nakamura , Norikawa , and Toshiyuki Sakamoto Maaya .
Morita will release the next series of shorts on October 8. Currently, it is rumored to have a manga adaptation titled Kashiwa-no-ha no Sora no Shita, translated as (“Under the Sky of Kashiwa-no-ha”), which can be read on the web at Kadokawa and has been directed by Fumio Aya .
Source: ANN
