Fourth Sumikko Gurashi Film Shares a New Clip

The official account for the Sumikko Gurashi films shared a charming new clip on Friday from the fourth movie, The Sky Kingdom and the Two Children. In it, the Sumikko characters play a set of sacred flowers to make music, gently conducted by a penguin looking creature, while the trailer that follows previews Kaela Kimura’s theme song Your Umbrella.

The film keeps much of its familiar team together. Yoshihiko Inohara and Manami Honjō return as narrators, with Naomi Iwata directing at the studio Fanworks, and returning scriptwriter Takashi Sumita and art director Kaori Hino back from earlier films. Asmik Ace is distributing, and the movie opens on October 31.

For the uninitiated, Sumikko Gurashi began in 2012 as a set of shy, slightly downbeat characters who simply love hiding in the corner of a room. The cast includes Shirokuma, a polar bear who hates the cold, the self doubting Penguin?, an uneaten piece of pork cutlet called Tonkatsu, a bashful cat, and a lizard quietly hiding that he is really one of the last dinosaurs.

The franchise has been a real success on the big screen too. Its first film in 2019 sold well over a million tickets, earned around 1.4 billion yen, and even won a Best Animation award.

This fourth outing looks set to continue that cozy, heartwarming tradition.

My take: Sumikko Gurashi is pure, gentle comfort, and these little characters never fail to make me smile. A musical scene with sacred flowers sounds exactly as sweet and soothing as I would hope.