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Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly (Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] II.lost butterfly)

Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly (劇場版「Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel]」Ⅱ.lost butterfly) is a 2019 Japanese animated film directed by Tomonori Sudo (須藤友徳) and produced by the studio ufotable. It is the second installment of a three-part theatrical adaptation of Heaven's Feel, the third and final route of the visual novel (branching, text-based interactive story game with multiple routes) game Fate/stay night, also known as the Sakura Route because it follows the heroine Sakura Matou (間桐桜).1 • 2 The film opened in Japan on January 12, 2019, runs 117 minutes, and was distributed by Aniplex.3

Key factDetail
Japanese releaseJanuary 12, 2019, nationwide on 131 screens; 117 minutes, rated PG123 • 4
Source materialHeaven's Feel route (the Sakura Route) of TYPE-MOON's visual novel Fate/stay night, adapted as the middle chapter of a film trilogy1
Director / studioTomonori Sudo, who also served as character designer with Atsushi Ikariya and Hisayuki Tabata; animation by ufotable1
MusicYuki Kajiura; theme song performed by Aimer1 • 3
Opening weekend276,795 admissions and 490,506,195 yen over two days; first place in both admissions and revenue5
Japanese total1.66 billion yen, among the top-grossing Japanese films of 20196
Home videoBlu-ray and DVD released August 21, 2019, with Japanese and English audio7 • 8

Spoilers

Plot

Fuyuki, present day, mid-war. Shirou Emiya (Noriaki Sugiyama), an amateur mage who inherited his dead father's ideal of saving everyone, is recovering from the battle that cost him his Servant, Saber, and nearly cost him his life. Saber did not simply die: she was consumed by the shadow and now walks the city as Saber Alter (Ayako Kawasumi), a blackened, hollow-eyed king. Sakura Matou (Noriko Shitaya), the soft-spoken girl who has loved Shirou for years, is bound to that same shadow, and her Servant Rider (Yu Asakawa) now answers to her alone.

The shadow keeps killing. Servants fall in the night, the rules of the war dissolve, and the old patriarch Zouken Matou (Masane Tsukayama), Sakura's grandfather, watches from the margins. Zouken is the one who reveals to Shirou that the shadow and Sakura are one and the same, and that the only way to end the killing is to end her.

The film's signature sequence is the battle between Saber Alter and Berserker in the snow, in which the corrupted king fires Excalibur again and again without ever shouting its name. Berserker, guarding the girl Illya, meets each blast with his Twelve Labors, the God Hand that requires twelve deaths before he stays dead. Blackened blade against stone axe, yellow sparks and abyss-black shadow, the Einzbern castle burning around them until Saber wins with a cross-counter that levels the castle itself.18

Between battles, the film descends into Sakura's nightmare. A fairy-tale-styled sequence follows her wandering the city at night, hollow and hungry, devouring the men who hit on her, staged with dreamlike softness that makes it worse.18 The truth of the Matou house comes out in full: Sakura was given away to the Matou family as a child, tortured with their crest worms by Zouken, abused by her brother Shinji (Hiroshi Kamiya), and shaped into the vessel of the Grail itself, the shadow's source.19 Shinji, drunk, tries to force himself on her one last time, and Sakura kills him. The shadow swells.

Zouken hands Shirou the knife: kill Sakura, and the killing stops. Shirou enters Sakura's bedroom carrying a kitchen knife, and instead breaks down in tears, the first time he has cried in any version of the story, and answers the question of whether he will betray his ideals by casting them off: he will be an ally of justice for Sakura alone.18 He then walks to the church and asks Kirei Kotomine to kill Sakura if he fails, a bargain the priest receives with something like delight.

The action finale follows. Archer, the future Shirou, holds off the shadow and dies buying time, his shield Rho Aias staged as a payoff to earlier foreshadowing.20 Rider fights Saber Alter in the rain to protect her mistress and falls. Shirou, projecting the corrupted arm of Archer, a weapon that destroys him a little more with every use, faces Saber Alter alone in the freezing Einzbern forest and wins by accepting his limits rather than transcending them, the victory looking like a wound. In the aftermath, Rin turns her family's jewel magic on her sister rather than let the shadow win, and Shirou arrives to take Sakura back, carrying her out of the dark. The war barely matters anymore; the third chapter must answer what saving her will cost.

Characters

Shirou Emiya (Noriaki Sugiyama) is an amateur mage whose inherited creed, save everyone, collides head-on with the one person he cannot save without abandoning the creed. The film is about him choosing.

Sakura Matou (Noriko Shitaya) is the film's wounded center: soft-spoken, abused for years by the Matou family, secretly the Grail's vessel and the shadow's source, and given interiority in small register shifts rather than speeches.

Rin Tohsaka (Kana Ueda) is Sakura's estranged sister and Shirou's sometime ally, torn between mage duty and family, and increasingly out of her depth.

Saber Alter (Ayako Kawasumi) is the corrupted King of Knights, silent, blackened, and terrifying, the war's fallen ideal made flesh.

Rider (Yu Asakawa) is Sakura's Servant, whose loyalty to her broken mistress is one of the story's steadier truths.

Kirei Kotomine (Joji Nakata) is the priest whose motives have never been simple villainy, and who accepts Shirou's terrible request with something like joy.

Zouken Matou (Masane Tsukayama) is the ancient patriarch whose cruelty created everything the film is about.

Interpretations and controversies

Critics have read the film as a bracing, challenging depiction of abuse and the cycles of violence it creates, with Shirou and Sakura growing more entwined in each other's lives as the world around them collapses.21 It is also noted as the anime adaptation that comes closest to the visual novel's adult roots, featuring sex scenes, with the worst abuse, including Shinji's repeated sexual assault of Sakura, left largely to implication.22 The film's willingness to make its heroine a disaster rather than a prize, and to leave her victims' moral weight largely unexamined until the finale, remains the trilogy's most debated choice.

Sequels, prequels, and universe

This is the second film of the Heaven's Feel trilogy adapting the third route of the Fate/stay night visual novel, following I. presage flower (2017) and followed by III. spring song (2020).23

Place in the series

Fate/stay night is a visual novel in which magi called Masters fight a Holy Grail War alongside heroic spirits called Servants, and the story branches into three routes. The Heaven's Feel route, centered on Sakura Matou, was adapted as a trilogy of theatrical films: I. presage flower (2017), II. lost butterfly (2019), and III. spring song (2020).1 • 9 Aniplex describes lost butterfly as the trilogy's most important episode, depicting its turning point.1

The film picks up after the first chapter: the Holy Grail War in Fuyuki City, beginning for the first time in ten years, is distorted by the entry of Zouken Matou (間桐臓硯), head of one of the war's three founding families, who summons the Servant True Assassin. An unknown shadow moves through the city, killing Masters and Servants one by one. Shirou Emiya (衛宮士郎) is injured and loses his Servant Saber, but refuses to leave the war in order to protect Sakura, who is herself caught in the fate of a mage.1 • 10

Production

The original story is by Kinoko Nasu (奈須きのこ) of TYPE-MOON, with original character design by Takashi Takeuchi (武内崇). Tomonori Sudo directed and designed characters, having worked as a character designer and animation director on earlier TYPE-MOON adaptations; ufotable, which produced the 2014 television anime Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works], handled animation. Akira Hiyama wrote the screenplay, Koji Eto was art director, Yuichi Terao director of photography, and Hikaru Kondo animation producer.1 • 11

The Japanese cast reprises the television series roles: Noriaki Sugiyama as Shirou Emiya, Noriko Shitaya as Sakura Matou, Kana Ueda as Rin Tohsaka, Ayako Kawasumi as Saber Alter, Junichi Suwabe as Archer, and Takuma Terashima's colleague list also includes Daisuke Namikawa's castmates such as Hiroshi Kamiya as Shinji Matou and Joji Nakata as Kirei Kotomine, with Masatoshi Tsukada's role of Zouken Matou played by Masanori Tsukayama and True Assassin voiced by Tetsu Inada.1 • 3 Aniplex of America's release reunites the English cast of the earlier adaptations, including Bryce Papenbrook as Shirou, Kari Wahlgren as Saber, Mela Lee as Rin, and Cristina Vee as Sakura.2

Box office performance

Opening. The film debuted at first place in Japan's weekend rankings for both admissions and revenue, drawing 276,795 admissions and 490,506,195 yen over its first Saturday and Sunday; the cumulative three-day total from January 12 to 14 was 363,080 admissions and 602,841,741 yen.5 • 12 Compared with the opening of the first film, I. presage flower, this represented 112 percent in admissions and 118 percent in revenue.12 It also ranked first in Pia's first-day satisfaction survey with 92.3 points and first in Filmarks' first-day satisfaction ranking for the third week of January.5

Run. By its twelfth day, January 23, the film had passed 1 billion yen in ticket sales with about 648,000 admissions, reaching that milestone six days faster than the first film and running at 121 percent of presage flower in admissions and 123 percent in revenue over the same period.4 Its final Japanese gross was 1.66 billion yen, placing it among 2019's highest-earning Japanese releases in a record year for the domestic market.6 For comparison, the first film in the trilogy drew 980,000 admissions and 1.5 billion yen.1

International. Box Office Mojo records a worldwide gross of $17,296,294 across eight markets, of which $12,057,492 came from Japan and $4,265,312 from China; The Numbers lists a higher worldwide figure of $19,790,000, and the two databases disagree on the total.13 • 10 In China, where the film opened on July 12, 2019 under the title 运命之夜－天之杯Ⅱ：迷失之蝶, it earned 29.695 million yuan, ranking 11th among Japanese films released in China that year.14 In North America, Fathom Events handled the theatrical release, which accounted for $420,595 of the domestic gross.13

Home video and reception

The Blu-ray and DVD were released in Japan on August 21, 2019, accompanied by a making-of feature titled "Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] Ⅱ.lost butterfly Animation Material" and Japanese and English subtitles.7 The North American release carries Japanese and English audio.8

Critics singled out the animation and the score. Anime UK News wrote that the film "delivers what Fate/Stay Night fans have been waiting for, with quality animation and fantastic pacing," while noting it is not beginner-friendly because it continues directly from the first film without recapping.15 The Fandom Post's review called Yuki Kajiura's soundtrack one of her best and praised Aimer's ending theme.16 On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 90 percent audience score, with the site summarizing the plot as a teen fighting for the Holy Grail while protecting a girl with mysterious powers.17

References

  1. [劇場版「Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel]」Ⅱ.lost butterfly, Aniplex official site](https://www.aniplex.co.jp/lineup/fate-sn-2nd/)
  2. [Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] II. lost butterfly press release, Aniplex of America](https://aniplexusa.com/pdf/PR_0704_FSNHF2.pdf)
  3. [劇場版 Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] II. lost butterfly, 映画.com](https://cinema.eiga.com/movie/88009/)
  4. [劇場版「Fate/stay night [HF] II.lost butterfly」の興行収入が10億円を突破, 4Gamer](https://www.4gamer.net/games/266/G026651/20190124078/)
  5. 動員・興行収入共に週末ランキング１位獲得！, Aniplex news
  6. 2019年興行収入は過去最高の2611億円, 映画ナタリー
  7. Fate/stay night: Heaven's Feel II DVD/Blu-ray Set to Be Released on August 21, 2019, Crunchyroll News
  8. [PURCHASE, THE MOVIE Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] Ⅱ.lost butterfly USA official site](https://www.fatestaynightusa.com/2nd/purchase/)
  9. [Fate/stay night the Movie [Heaven's Feel] II. lost butterfly, TYPE-MOON Wiki](https://typemoon.fandom.com/wiki/Fate/stay_night_-_Heaven%27s_Feel_-_II._Lost_Butterfly)
  10. Gekijouban Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel - II. Lost Butterfly (2019), The Numbers
  11. [THE MOVIE Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] Ⅱ.lost butterfly, USA official site](https://www.fatestaynightusa.com/2nd/)
  12. 映画興行成績：「Fate／stay night［HF］」第2章が初登場首位, MANTANWEB
  13. [Fate/stay night [Heaven's Feel] II. lost butterfly (2019), Box Office Mojo](https://www.boxofficemojo.com/title/tt8091892/)
  14. 2-9. 中国で公開された日本映画（2019年②）, JETRO
  15. Fate/Stay Night Heaven's Feel II: Lost Butterfly Review, Anime UK News
  16. Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly Anime Review, The Fandom Post
  17. Fate/Stay Night: Heaven's Feel II. Lost Butterfly, Rotten Tomatoes
  18. https://filmest.jp/fatestaynight_heavens_feel2/
  19. https://shallowdivesinanime.wordpress.com/2019/02/28/fate-stay-night-heavens-feel-ii-lost-butterfly-escalation-into-madness/
  20. https://www.leossan-2nd.com/entry/2020/02/28/Fate/stay_night_%5BHeaven%27s_Feel%5D_II__lost_butterfly
  21. https://www.jonathanlack.com/p/fatestay-night-heavens-feel-ii-lost
  22. https://web.archive.org/web/20190116042056/https:/www.animenewsnetwork.com/review/fate/stay-night/heaven-feel-ii-lost-butterfly/.141876
  23. https://anilist.co/anime/21718/Fatestay-night-Heavens-Feel-II-lost-butterfly

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026

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