General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

X (X -エックス-) (1996 film)

X (X -エックス-), also known as X/1999 or X: The Movie, is a 1996 Japanese animated film directed by Rintaro and produced by the Madhouse studio, adapted from the apocalyptic manga X by the four-woman creative group CLAMP. It was released in Japan on August 3, 1996, distributed by Toei, with a runtime of 97 minutes.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese release	August 3, 1996, distributed by Toei; 97 minutes, color¹
Director and studio	Rintaro (りんたろう), production by Madhouse¹
Source	CLAMP's manga X, serialized in Monthly Asuka; CLAMP member Nanase Ohkawa worked on the planning and co-wrote the screenplay²
Premise	In 1999, the Dragons of Earth, who want to destroy humanity so nature can regenerate, battle the Dragons of Heaven, who protect the world with barriers; the boy Kamui holds the deciding power²
Manga status at release	Only 7 volumes of the manga had appeared when the film opened³
English-language release	Theatrically distributed by Manga Entertainment; rated R for gore, violence, and nudity; US gross $142.5K; DVD December 6, 2005⁴
Reception	44% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (18 reviews); Metascore 40 based on 13 critic reviews⁴^•⁵

Spoilers

Story

The film is set in 1999, the "Year of Destiny," when the end of the world is due to begin. Two camps of psychically gifted fighters oppose each other: the Dragons of Earth, who intend to destroy humanity so that the planet's nature can regenerate, and the Dragons of Heaven, who try to prevent the destruction by raising barriers from great structures such as buildings.²^•⁶

The story's pivot is Kamui Shiro (司狼神威), a first-year high school student with the power to decide Earth's future. He returns to Tokyo after six years away, having left as an elementary school student, and reunites with his childhood friends Kotori Monou and her older brother Fuma. The dreamseer Hinoto gathers the six Dragons of Heaven and asks Kamui to join them and protect the Earth; Kamui chooses the Dragons of Heaven, and Fuma, his closest friend, becomes a Dragon of Earth who fights him.²^•⁶^•⁷ The final battle takes place at Tokyo Tower, the last barrier, where Kamui barely defeats Fuma but grieves that he could not protect either Fuma or Kotori.⁸

Production

The screenplay is credited to Rintaro, Mami Watanabe (渡辺麻実), and Nanase Ohkawa, with CLAMP as original creator.⁹ The music was composed by Yoshiki Hayashi and Yasuaki Shimizu.¹⁰ The main Japanese voice cast featured Tomokazu Seki as Kamui, Junko Iwao as Kotori, and Ken Narita as Fuma.⁴

The film was made while its source manga was still in its early stages. Only seven collected volumes had been published at the time of release, and the manga was less than half finished, so the filmmakers had to invent an ending and compensate for incomplete character development.³^•¹¹ Because the full story was too complex to fit into one movie, the film concentrated on the Last Battle alone.¹²

Reception

Critical response was mixed, with praise concentrated on the visuals. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 44% Tomatometer from 18 reviews, and its Metascore on Metacritic is 40, described as "mixed or average," from 13 critic reviews.⁴^•⁵ Reviewers singled out the animation: one critic quoted by Metacritic called it "a beautifully drawn film and engaging story marred only by its vague character development and mediocre voice-overs," while another found it "the most overblown and confusing example of anime yet."⁵ The Animation World Network's contemporary survey of Japanese anime film reviews recorded the consensus that Rintaro's direction was spectacular but that the film was non-stop bloody action incomprehensible to anyone unfamiliar with the manga.¹² A German television guide summarized the same split: "reduced in content, but what an eyeful," noting that readers of the original manga would be disappointed by the many dropped storylines.¹⁰

In the United States, Manga Entertainment released the film theatrically with an R rating for gore, violence, and nudity; it grossed $142.5K and reached DVD on December 6, 2005.⁴ An academic study of Rintaro's films records an average user rating of 6.2 for X/1999 from 2,163 users, and places the film in the "anime fans only" space alongside Doomed Megalopolis, below the broader appeal of his later Metropolis.¹³

Place in the X franchise

The film is one of three animated versions of a story whose manga has never concluded. CLAMP began serializing X in the magazine Monthly Asuka in 1992; publication stopped in 2003 with 18 collected volumes plus one additional volume, leaving the story without its planned ending. The hiatus followed real events in Japan, including the Kobe earthquake and widely reported violent crimes, which made the manga's depictions of earthquakes, collapsing Tokyo buildings, and violent deaths uncomfortable; the publisher asked for changes, CLAMP refused to alter the planned ending, and the series froze.¹⁴

Because the manga never reached its conclusion, the animated adaptations supplied endings of their own. The 1996 film condensed the conflict into a single tragic climax, while the 2001-2002 television series, also produced by Madhouse, ran 24 episodes, took more time with the characters, and proposed a different but likewise closed ending.¹⁴ A scholarly account of media franchises describes the two as offering one possible outcome for the events and a completely opposite alternative ending, respectively.¹⁵ The film also followed an earlier, shorter animated treatment: X was first animated in 1993 as a 25-minute music video, X2.¹²

Legacy

The film remains a reference point for Rintaro's visual style. A career retrospective places X (1996) in his sequence of theatrical features between the Labyrinth Tales omnibus (1987) and Metropolis (2001).¹⁶ Animator Asako Nishida, in a retrospective interview, recalled the impact of the character work drawn by Nobuteru Yuki for the film.¹⁷ Decades after release, viewers continue to note the contrast between the film's hand-drawn animation and its abbreviated storytelling, and no widely available remastered home-video edition had appeared as of the mid-2020s.¹⁸

References

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