Opening in select theaters on Nov. 24 is a feature-length anime film, “The Summit of the Gods.” It’s about Mount Everest, its allure, and the obsession that its summit cultivates in mountaineers.
“The Summit of the Gods” is a 2D anime-style feature film derived and adapted from the popular manga series by the same name. The storyline follows a young adventure photojournalist who becomes fixated on retracing the 70-year-old steps of the first mountaineers to ascend Mount Everest (29,031.7 feet), Andrew Irvine and George Mallory.
“The Summit of the Gods” official synopsis reads:
Were George Mallory and his companion Andrew Irvine the first men to scale Everest on June 8th, 1924? Only the little Kodak camera they took with them might reveal the truth.
In Kathmandu, 70 years later, a young Japanese reporter named Fukamachi recognizes the camera in the hands of the mysterious Habu Jôji, an outcast climber believed missing for years. Fukamachi enters a world of obsessive mountaineers hungry for impossible conquests on a journey that leads him, step by step, towards the summit of the gods.
Netflix bought rights to the animated film’s distribution back in August 2021 and will release “The Summit of the Gods” to select theaters in the U.S. (Nov. 24) and the U.K. (Nov. 26) before streaming it on Nov. 30.
The five-volume manga series from which the film springs was written and illustrated by Jiro Taniguchi and published from 2000 through 2003. The actual originator of the story is Baku Yumemakura, whose 1998 novel served as the basis for Taniguchi’s series.
The manga series won Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affair’s 2001 award for excellence, owing to Taniguchi’s “powerful illustrations [that] seem to transport the reader right up into the mountains.”
And the film received entry to the Cannes Film Festival in 2021.
