Your Letter Anime Film Opens in Japan, Your Name Studio's First Export

The Your Letter anime film, a Korean coming-of-age drama about a bullied transfer student and a trail of anonymous letters, opens in Japanese theaters on September 25 under the title En no Tegami. Its distributor is CoMix Wave Films, the studio behind Your Name and Suzume. According to Anime.com, which reported the final poster and release date, the film is the first overseas animated feature the studio has taken on as a theatrical distributor.

The story centers on So-ri, a middle school student who moves to a countryside school after being bullied for standing up for a friend. She keeps to herself until she finds a letter taped inside her desk drawer from a student named Ho-yeon, and each note points her toward the next in a scavenger hunt across the school. Along the way she keeps running into a classmate named Dong-soon, and the two follow the trail together. The hook is simple: she wants to find the last letter and thank the sender in person. The setup gives the film its treasure-hunt structure and its emotional one, since every clue is also an invitation for So-ri to trust someone new. That wording comes from the synopsis Animation Magazine published when Crunchyroll announced its North American screenings.

The film grew out of a webtoon by Hyeon A Cho, serialized on Naver Webtoon in 2018 and later released in English through Line Webtoon. Kim Yong-hwan directed, with STUDIO LICO and Studio N producing a blend of hand-drawn and CG animation across ninety-six minutes. Lee Su-hyun of the K-pop duo AKMU voices So-ri in her first acting role, joined by Kim Min-ju, Min Seung-woo and Nam Doh-hyeong. The film has since picked up a Baeksang nomination for best new director for Kim, and it is up for best adaptation at the Harvey Awards.

A festival favorite long before release

Your Letter premiered at the Ottawa International Animation Festival in 2024 and was chosen as the opening film of the twenty-sixth Bucheon International Animation Festival, where it collected three prizes: the jury prize for feature film, the Cocomics music prize, and the industry association's technical achievement award.

Korean critics responded to the craft. Sangmin Sung of IGN Korea said in his review that the film's colors made the scenery feel realistic and its movement fluid, singling out the darker-toned tense scenes as standouts. He also noted the film raises its frame rate in those moments, a small technical choice that lands. Lee Ja-yeon of Cine21 liked how the story moves. The endorsement that probably matters most to the people now selling it in Japan came from CoMix Wave producer Kazuki Sunama, who worked on both Your Name and Suzume. He called Your Letter the most entertaining Korean animated film he had seen in the past twenty years, according to its Wikipedia page.

Why the Your Name studio's bet matters

CoMix Wave Films' involvement goes beyond distribution. The company says its own staff worked directly on the production, handling direction, background art, finishing and photography in collaboration with STUDIO LICO. The company also describes Your Letter as the first overseas animated feature it has distributed as a studio, a milestone it announced alongside the final poster in July.

The film has been gathering momentum for a while. South Korea saw it in theaters on October 1, 2025. Crunchyroll then carried it into North America for a one-night-only Anime Nights screening on August 17, and into Australia on August 27. Back home, News1 critic Jeong Yu-jin placed the film inside what she described as an animated film boom, alongside Exorcism Chronicles: The Beginning and the breakout hit KPop Demon Hunters.

For animation fans, the Your Letter anime film's Japanese release lands in a packed fall season, the same window bringing the Apothecary Diaries' third season and Black Clover's return to Crunchyroll. GenZNewZ recently covered Night City's return in Cyberpunk: Edgerunners 2 and hololive's first TV anime reveal, and this fall keeps the streak going. Those are spectacle shows. Your Letter is about a girl reading letters in an empty classroom, which is a quieter kind of appointment viewing, and the kind of story that tends to find its people.