Annecy 2026: A New Dawn Review | Stunning moments but a missed opportunity
© Charades Films
A New Dawn is a movie about clashing ideas. Some of them deepen the film’s thematic explorations, some rid it of narrative coherence. As A New Dawn looks to get under the skin of the topic of gentrification, visual ideas which include dissonant colours and mixed-media sequences are great aids to exploring the subject. However, clumsy dialogue gets in the way of emphasising the human aspect of it.
Competing in this year’s Contrechamp selection at the Annecy festival, A New Dawn comes from director Yoshitoshi Shinomiya, a previous collaborator with Your Name director Makoto Shinkai. Shinomiya took an auteurist approach to A New Dawn, being the film’s colour designer, art director and animation director. His story centres around a trio of late-teens looking to save their town and family home from being flattened in favour of a solar farm. Siblings Keitaro and Sentaro, along with their friend Kaoru, attempt to put on a village-saving firework act, one of defiance in the face of inevitable “progress.”
The theme of rallying against gentrification is increasingly cinematic, more and more audiences are immediately sympathetic towards characters rebelling against big corporations and A New Dawn wants the audience to have that automatic buy-in. Unfortunately, the film puts in no effort to endear the audience to these characters as people, with almost all of the dialogue being stilted exposition.
There is barely a spoken line in A New Dawn that feels like it would actually come out of a human being’s mouth, everyone constantly spouting their moral position on the situation. It wants to heighten the drama and the stakes but actually makes the situation feel silly. You want to take these people seriously but when every conversation feels like a back and forth between “someone has to do something!” and “you can’t stop progress,” it’s really hard to keep on caring.
A New Dawn’s biggest sin is boiling entire characters down to those two philosophies and not giving them any actual personality. Keitaro is the only of the trio of friends who stands out for his emo look and more intense focus on the task at hand. The other two characters only ever talking about the problem at hand nullifies this and makes them all feel the same.
© Charades Films
For all of the exposition spouted almost constantly in A New Dawn, it is unreasonably difficult to grasp plot threads and the overall plan. The film feels confused about whether or not the firework show the kids plan is an inconsequential act of defiance or something they believe can change the course of the town’s future. Perhaps that confusion is the point, but it feels muddled in execution.
One thing that undeniably works about A New Dawn is its art direction. The characters look distanced from the world around them, slightly offset from the backgrounds like interactable elements in a video game, representing the way that they’re being torn apart from their homes, or the disaffection they feel towards the idea of saving them. At times, the characters look pasted on top of the backgrounds as if stuck on with a glue stick, yet they move just as smoothly as everything else, a mesmerising effect.
© Charades Films
In a few stunning moments, A New Dawn mixes in other types of media to its typical 2D animation. One sees Kaoru in front of a live action wall of greenery, further pushing the point of her relationship with her surroundings. Another sequence is fully stop motion fantasy which adds such freshness to a movie that can feel like it’s running in place far too often.
A New Dawn’s visual ideas are so strong, down to the colours used. So many films looking to sell us on how beautiful they look, specifically those selling us on the beauty of nature, rely on bright blues and greens. A New Dawn’s colour choices aren’t so obvious but work brilliantly, neon yellows and boring beiges occupy the frames simulateously, a difficult challenge but one that somehow works. A New Dawn looks absolutely stellar, clashing frustratingly with the lack of elegance in its script.
Few things are more frustrating than a film that flirts with an interesting, juicy, commendable topic but never plunges past the surface. For all the exposition and philosophising from the characters in A New Dawn, the actual stakes, emotion and real life impact of gentrification, corporate-mandated enshittification, and young people growing into a world they don’t feel the need to fight for are completely invisible. A New Dawn is a missed opportunity, but is pretty enough.