Biography|Hikaru Kondo — An Animation Studio Opened a Cinema on This Arcade

On 18 March 2012 an animation studio opened a movie house.

ufotable CINEMA stands at 1-5-3 Higashi-Shinmachi, on Tokushima's Higashi-Shinmachi shopping arcade, on the former McDonald's lot.

Two screens. Seventy-nine seats in one room, twenty-nine in the other.

Japanese press at the time called it the first cinema run by an animation production company.

Governor Kamon Iizumi and voice actor Mamiko Noto appeared at the opening. The first bills included four Anime Mirai shorts from a cultural-affairs project.

Animate Tokushima moved into the basement from Poppo-gai the same day.

The building is a short walk from the river cafe and from Shinmachibashi East Park. Kondo had already planted a studio and a shop in the hometown. The cinema made the block a full circuit: draw, eat, screen.

Nakanojirou designed it. Himeno-gumi built it.

The house still runs without a regular closing day. There is no dedicated car park. Visitors walk from Tokushima Station in about ten minutes.

This pin is the arcade facade, a public ticket window, not a private cutting room.

From 2012 the same company that had started on two desks in Ikebukuro owned a screen in the prefecture where its president was born.

Photo: Razgrad, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons