A streak of green appeared on the screen.
The title: The Garden of Words.
Miyu had not expected much from a forty-minute companion piece. Most side story anime were character supplements to the main work. Context and backstory, presented in a format slightly more elaborate than a behind-the-scenes feature.
What she watched was an entirely independent story.
Yukari Yukino and Takao Akizuki. Their relationship built across rainy mornings in a garden, a teacher and a student who were both, in different ways, not quite able to move forward with their lives.
The specific texture of what it meant to find someone who made being stuck feel temporarily acceptable. And then the question of what happened when the rain stopped and the ordinary world reasserted itself.
By the final sequence, Yukari Yukino on the stairs, holding onto Takao Akizuki, saying the words she had not been able to say across all the preceding mornings, Miyu was fighting very hard not to make a sound in front of Rei.
She understood something about Yukari Yukino that she had not expected to understand. The specific anxiety of logging into a creator account and finding the comments. The fear that what you had made would be dismissed.
The particular loneliness of caring deeply about something that other people might simply find inadequate.
Shirogane-sensei had written a character who felt this, and had written it accurately, and had then given that character a moment of being held.
Miyu looked at the ceiling of the cinema for a moment and breathed carefully.
Walking out of the hall into the corridor, she noticed that the Illumination Production Company employees emerging from the other hall had the specific expressions of people who had not fully returned yet.
"The last song. You wrote it?"
"Yes."
"What is it called?"
"Rain." Rei looked back at her and smiled. "I love that one too."
The celebration banquet that evening ran at a high mood. The Your Name project bonuses were distributed, the company announced a three-day holiday to follow, and everyone present understood clearly that when September arrived the pace would change again.
The My Neighbor Totoro release date had not yet been confirmed. Spirited Away was fixed: next year's summer season. One year of production time. Budget was not a constraint. If the director needed any professional in Japan's animation industry, Rei and Illumination Production Company would find them.
What would not move was the schedule, and quality was not negotiable. Three times a normal production team's headcount, with outsourced personnel already on standby. The cost would be significantly elevated. Rei did not find this a meaningful concern. Money was renewable. Time was not.
Shirogane Animation had released the internal screening of The Garden of Words as a promotional announcement online.
The response from Japan's anime fans arrived within minutes.
"Illumination Production Company's entire staff watched The Garden of Words in a booked cinema before any of us can see it. I have not been this jealous of an employment arrangement in my life."
"The only people in Japan who have watched The Garden of Words in a cinema are Illumination Production Company employees. Every single one of them. I need to reconsider my career."
"Rain is listed as the ending song. Composed by Shirogane-sensei. This is the first piece of information I have about The Garden of Words and I am already thinking about buying the Blu-ray."
"The Garden of Words is a companion piece to Your Name and is somehow, according to everyone who has seen it, completely its own story. How is Shirogane-sensei doing this. He produced a forty-minute companion anime that functions as an independent film."
"The expressions on the Illumination Production Company staff leaving the cinema in the promotional footage. Those are not the expressions of people who watched a bonus feature. Those are the expressions of people who watched something real."
A wave of fan commentary immediately followed the promotional announcement, with many directing their frustration at Japan's theatrical regulations. A forty-minute work denied a cinema release purely on the basis of runtime. The argument had obvious merit and went nowhere, as these arguments tended to.
Through the week, news related to Rei continued appearing in steady succession.
Then Thursday arrived.
Every other conversation in Japan's anime community stopped.
This week's Attack on Titan episode did not deliver the Eren rematch against the Female Titan that fans had been waiting for.
What it delivered instead was the two strongest humans in the series.
Mikasa Ackerman and Levi Ackerman, operating together.
Before this episode, the audience knew these two were strong. The series had established this through dialogue, through reputation, through the visible gap between how they moved and how everyone else moved.
But knowing something was stated and watching it demonstrated were different experiences, and nothing in the preceding seventeen episodes had prepared anyone for what this episode showed.
Mikasa went after the Female Titan that had killed Eren, and she was completely dominant. The same opponent that had processed the entire Levi Squad and then defeated Eren in under two minutes was being taken apart by a single human with blades.
Every movement Mikasa made was clean and committed, no hesitation, the grief of watching Eren be taken converted entirely into precision.
Levi followed behind the Female Titan. Four members of his squad had been killed. His expression had not changed. He tracked her movements through the trees, reading the openings, waiting for the moment that the combined pressure of both of them created something usable.
Then the joint surprise attack arrived.
The storyboarding for this sequence was operating at a level that left anime fans across Japan sitting in front of their televisions in a condition somewhere between shock and complete inability to form coherent responses.
The speed. The angles. The way both of them used the terrain and each other's positioning simultaneously without any visible coordination, as if two people who had each individually achieved a level of ability that exceeded normal human range naturally produced a combined approach that was greater than either alone.
The Female Titan that had felt unstoppable two episodes ago was being handled.
Then the episode's second cruelty arrived.
The return to the city required the Survey Corps to move through open ground with Mindless Titans in pursuit. Levi, without visible hesitation, ordered the bodies of Petra and the other fallen squad members used as bait. Dropped to draw the Titans away from the path of the survivors.
He gave this order about his own people. His expression did not change.
The survivors escaped.
After the episode ended, Japan's Attack on Titan fan community went online with a specific quality of collective confusion.
"Is Eren actually a Titan. Are Mikasa and Levi actually human. These are questions I am genuinely asking after watching this episode."
"Eren fought a depleted Female Titan for under two minutes and lost. Mikasa fought the same Female Titan fresh from finishing Eren and was completely dominant. I need to understand what I am watching."
"The joint attack sequence. I have watched it six times. The storyboarding in this sequence is technically exceptional in a way that I want to describe but cannot find adequate language for."
"Shirogane-sensei. I am going to say this directly. Please let Eren die, make Levi the protagonist, and have Mikasa's feelings shift accordingly. This is my formal request."
"Stop making Levi this cool. Eren has existed in this series for seventeen episodes and Levi has had approximately four of them and the gap in presence is visible from space."