Name: Your Letter
Director: Kim Yong-hwan
Genre: Animation, Drama, Mystery, Adventure
Released: 2025-10-01T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 96 min
Cast: Lee Su-hyun, Kim Min-joo, Min Seung-woo, Nam Do-hyung, Kim Yeon-woo

The studio that turned Makoto Shinkai into a global box-office name is, for the first time, putting its distribution weight behind a film it did not make, and that film is Korean. Your Letter, an animated feature directed by Kim Yong-hwan and adapted from a hit webtoon, reaches Japanese cinemas as 縁の手紙, released by Comics Wave Film, the company that sent Your Name and Suzume around the world.

The gesture cuts against the grain in both directions. Comics Wave Film has spent its life exporting one director’s vision; here it is importing someone else’s. For Korean theatrical animation, long overshadowed at home by live-action cinema and abroad by the sheer scale of Japanese anime, a nationwide Japanese release curated by that particular label is an unusual kind of endorsement.

Your Letter began as a webtoon by Cho Hyun-ah, serialized on Naver as a ten-part summer special before Studio Rico and STUDIO N built it into a feature. The story follows Sori, a girl who is bullied after standing up for a friend and transfers to a rural school, where she shuts down rather than start over. Then she finds a letter hidden in her desk, its message urging her to keep searching. Following the trail, she meets Dongsun, a prickly classmate who seems to know who wrote it, and the two chase the correspondence toward the promise buried inside it.

The film arrives with a festival record that helps explain the interest. It played the Ottawa International Animation Festival and opened the Bucheon International Animation Festival, where it took three prizes, including the jury award for a feature. Comics Wave Film has assembled a Japanese dub built around a marketing story of its own: idol-turned-performer Yabuki Nako voices Sori in her first acting role, opposite Ono Kensho and Umeda Shuichiro. That mirrors the original Korean version, where Lee Su-hyun of the duo AKMU took the lead as her own debut in voice work.

None of this settles the larger question the release seems to pose. One arthouse-scaled opening, however prestigious its backers, does not prove that Korean theatrical animation has broken through in Japan, a market saturated with domestic product and fiercely loyal to it. Comics Wave Film is distributing the film, not producing it, and a festival favorite’s performance at the box office in a rival animation capital is genuinely untested. The interesting part is the bet itself, not a result that has not happened yet.

A still from the Korean animated film Your Letter, directed by Kim Yong-hwan (2025) — A scene from Your Letter (2025)

What likely made the film legible to this distributor is its look. The trailer trades in the same warm, over-saturated light and lovingly rendered ordinary spaces, a sunlit library, a classroom at dusk, that made Shinkai’s work a box-office machine. That visual kinship gives Comics Wave Film a film it can market in a familiar register while pointing audiences somewhere new.

Your Letter opens in Japan on 25 September, playing Shinjuku Balt9 ahead of a nationwide rollout, roughly a year after its Korean theatrical run under Lotte Entertainment. For a quiet story about a lonely girl and a stack of hidden letters, it is carrying an outsized amount of cross-border weight.