Our man on the ground, T.R. Racki, watched the world premiere of To You in the Beyond at Anime Expo 2026. The film releases in Japan later this year.

A sixteen-year-old girl washes ashore on a remote Japanese island. Her first word in the year 2026 is “1974.” Kazuki, a fifteen-year old boy, takes refuge on the island to escape the public weight of his father’s actions. His lifelong best friend follows him, with such constant concern that others jokingly call him his nanny. A chain-smoking man in his thirties drifts along the shore with a fishing pole, seemingly nothing waiting for him beyond the water’s edge.

These are the pieces scattered across To You in the Beyond, a feature-length anime adaptation of Akiko Abe’s 2017 novel. A romantic coming-of-age story, it blends elements of fantasy and a heaping serving of mystery, creating a compelling story that is referred to by Japanese booksellers as “the novel that makes you cry”.

For a while, I wondered when that film was going to show up.

Beyond is undeniably beautiful. Its isolated island setting gives the movie a grand, lonely scale, with sweeping landscapes, vibrant colors, delicate details, and fluid animation. Yet the early stretch is so deliberately paced that beauty has to carry more weight than it should.

The film is packed full of meaningful, emotional reveals. The challenge is in holding on long enough to get there. Kazuki is introduced as a fairly ordinary teen. Nanao’s sudden arrival should immediately ignite the story. Instead, she retreats into extended self-isolation, leaving both Kazuki and the audience outside the door. That choice makes emotional sense later. In the moment, it is frustrating. I kept waiting for Nanao to stop being stubborn and come out of her room. At a certain point, her guardedness began to look less like mystery and more like rudeness, which made her difficult to invest in.

That is the danger of building a story around a deeply interconnected mystery. Hold the clues too loosely, and the ending loses power. Hold them too tightly, and the viewer may give up before the revelations arrive. For much of the first act, Beyond risks the latter.

Then Kazuki begins to play the piano.

The scene where his music finally draws Nanao out feels like the film taking its first real breath. In the theater, the audience seemed to exhale with it: partly in relief, partly in appreciation of the scene’s beauty. From there, Beyond moves with greater confidence. The mystery unravels at a steadier, more rewarding pace. The supporting cast stops feeling incidental and starts revealing the hidden histories that bind them to the island, to Nanao, and to Kazuki.

Nanao remains the film’s biggest challenge and, ultimately, its greatest reward. She is likable one moment and maddening the next. Her choices seem evasive, even unfair, until the last minutes, which reframes them. What first appeared to be stubbornness becomes grief, fear, love, and sacrifice. Her agape love, expressed through hidden action, gives the film its emotional center.

I was also struck by how directly the film invokes God. For a Japanese film, the repeated references felt intriguing and unexpectedly uplifting, especially with “God” capitalized in the subtitles. The later discussion of Noah’s Ark deepens that impression. “Who would be on your ark?” becomes one of the film’s guiding questions, suggesting that we choose who we want to carry with us through the storms of life.

The rainbow imagery adds another layer. Kazuki remembers seeing a massive rainbow when he first arrived on the island, a moment that made him feel safe. In Scripture, the rainbow is Yahweh’s promise that the earth will never again be destroyed by flood. Beyond returns repeatedly to water as death, rebirth, danger, and deliverance: the cove where Nanao washes ashore, the typhoons of 1974 and 2026, and the film’s eventual reveal of its own Noah’s Ark. Because that ark is rendered differently enough from the familiar Judeo-Christian image, its late appearance lands with surprising force.

While some parts of the ending of Beyond are predictable, they are satisfying. The number of threads waiting to be tied together provides unexpected, meaningful turns. More importantly, Nanao has been prepared with enough care that the final reveals feel earned rather than merely explained. I was not fully won over by Nanao until the final minutes. Then everything clicked. Her choices made sense. Her frustrating silence became beautiful.

Then all I wanted to do was watch it all over again.

And yes, I cried.

To You in the Beyond releases October 9th in Japan. International release pending.