Madhouse shuts down production on Satoshi Kon's final film "The Dreaming Machine"

by Chris MaGee

Last August fans of anime, and Japanese film in general, were shocked and saddened by the death of Satoshi Kon. The 46-year-old animator and director was taken from us far too early by pancreatic cancer, but his films "Perfect Blue", "Millennium Actress", "Tokyo Godfathers" and "Paprika" will stay with us forever. Fans of Kon were hoping to add to this list of ingenious feature films though. At the time of his death Kon and his crew at animation studio Madhouse were working on "The Dreaming Machine", a project Kon had described as a “future folklore story”. Now word comes via Twitch that fans will not be getting a look at "The Dreaming Machine" any time soon, in fact they may never get to see the film completed.

Despite character designer Yoshimi Itazu taking detailed instructions left for him by Kon to helm the project production on "The Dreaming Machine" has been halted. As revealed by Madhouse president Masao Maruyama recently, this decision was made after the animation studio faced hard financial times. While 600 completed shots for the film have been completed that is still less than half of the 1,500 that is needed to see the film finished. We can only hope that sometime in the future funds will become available so that the remainder of this last posthumous work by Satoshi Kon will be able to be presented to his fans.