General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Welcome to the Space Show (宇宙ショーへようこそ)

Welcome to the Space Show (宇宙ショーへようこそ, Uchū Shō e Yōkoso) is a 2010 Japanese animated science fiction adventure film directed by Koji Masunari, written by Hideyuki Kurata, and produced by the studio A-1 Pictures. It follows five elementary school children from a rural village who rescue an injured dog that turns out to be an alien botanist named Pochi, and are rewarded with a journey into space.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Koji Masunari (director), Hideyuki Kurata (screenplay); character design by Masashi Ishihama¹
Studio and runtime	A-1 Pictures; 136 minutes; Japanese release June 26, 2010¹^•³
Premiere	World premiere at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2010; nominated in the Generation Kplus section⁴
Production length	About four years; the planned 70,000 animation drawings grew to about 140,000⁵

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in Murakawa, a small village surrounded by nature whose elementary school has only five students: Natsuki, Amane, Koji, Noriko, and Kiyoshi. During their summer camp they go into the hills behind the school looking for the missing school rabbit, Pyon-Kichi, and instead find a giant crop circle and an injured dog lying beside it. They take the animal back and treat its wounds, and it thanks them in human speech: it is Pochi, an alien from the planet Wan who came to Earth from 21 million light years away. As a reward for saving his life, Pochi takes the children on a trip to the Moon, where a lunar city teems with strange aliens, and their summer becomes a large-scale space adventure.²^•⁶

English-language sources describe Pochi as a botanist from another world who comes to Earth searching for Zughaan, a plant of rare strength and power that humans on our planet know better as wasabi root. The children are whisked to a space colony on the dark side of the Moon, an interstellar melting pot filled with humorous alien creatures, jellyfish spaceships, and dragon trains.⁷ The rarity of Zughaan in space drives the film's central conflict, with many aliens believing the plant is a myth.⁸

Production

The production staff was announced in the February 2008 issue of Newtype magazine, under the working title The Space Show. Masunari, Kurata, and producer Tomonori Ochikoshi had earlier formed a creator unit called Besame Mucho, which produced Kamichu!, winner of the Excellence Award in the Animation Division of the Japan Media Arts Festival; Besame Mucho receives the original story credit, and Ishihama joined as a fourth member for this film.³^•⁹ It was Masunari's first theatrical film as director.³

A four-year build. Work began immediately after Kamichu! was finished. Kurata described the process as closer to television production than to a conventional feature: each block, such as the Earth section and the Moon section, was collected as it was completed and the team rolled the material forward, which is why the film took four years. Masunari said that neither he nor Kurata had made a theatrical film before and that they had to work by feel throughout.³ Producer Ochikoshi later said the workload reached roughly twice what was planned: the team had initially talked about a scale of about 70,000 animation drawings but ended at about 140,000, with most background alien crowds made in CG. Masunari, asked afterward whether he wanted to make another film, answered that it had been exhausting.⁵

Tomoyo Kurosawa voiced Natsuki and Keiji Fujiwara voiced Pochi.¹⁰ The music is by Yoshihiro Ike, and the theme song, "Who I Was Born to Be," was performed by Susan Boyle, who had become famous through her television appearance on Britain's Got Talent; before her contribution was announced, the film had been screened without a theme song.¹

Release

The film premiered at the 60th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2010 and was nominated in the festival's Generation Kplus section before its Japanese theatrical release on June 26, 2010, distributed by Aniplex.⁴^•¹ It was selected as one of the jury selections in the Animation Division of the 14th Japan Media Arts Festival.² In the United Kingdom it screened as part of the BFI Anime Weekend.¹¹

The North American distributor GKIDS released the film on Blu-ray and digital, credited to Kôji Masunari and Masaaki Yuasa, and a new English-language version premiered at the New York Int'l Children's Film Festival in 2013, recommended for ages 7 and up.⁷^•¹² The Japanese Blu-ray and DVD followed on February 9, 2011, with a fully production-limited three-disc edition that included two bonus DVDs, newly recorded audio commentary, and booklets.¹³ An official guidebook and the original soundtrack were also published in 2010, and a complete storyboard collection compiled by Masunari, about 700 pages including an interview, was announced for spring 2011.¹⁴^•⁵

Reception

Reviewers consistently praised the film's visual invention. GKIDS's synopsis calls it one of the most gleefully surreal depictions of alien life forms in cinema, and the DVD Talk review describes a "bewildering barrage of great designs" and a sheer volume of visual and conceptual creativity.⁷^•⁸ The same reviews raise a recurring criticism: at 136 minutes the film feels episodic and overlong, with a casual narrative momentum that focuses on characters and their emotional bonds more than plot, so that each new world Pochi visits plays like another episode of a television show.⁸^•¹⁵ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a Tomatometer score of 69% from one review, with an IMDb rating of 6.7 from about 1,200 users.¹⁶^•¹⁰ On the Japanese review site Filmarks it averages 3.2 out of 5 from 1,268 user reviews, with praise for the pop, colorful palette and energetic animation.¹⁷

When the project was announced, the producers boasted that the story would "surpass Star Wars in its scale"; the DVD Talk reviewer judged the boast not entirely unfounded, noting that the film sometimes seems to try to match the scale of the entire original trilogy.⁸

References

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