--- name: "Mamoru Hosoda" canonical: "https://film.one/person/mamoru-hosoda" roles: ["Director","Screenwriter"] born: "19 September 1967" reviewed_on_fi1m: 1 updated: "2026-09-17T06:49:33.392128+00:00" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Mamoru Hosoda Director and screenwriter. Born 19 September 1967 in Nakaniikawa District, Toyama, Japan. ## Details - **Work:** Director, Screenwriter - **Born:** 19 September 1967, Nakaniikawa District, Toyama, Japan - **Also known as:** Katsuwo Hashimoto, Katsuyo Hashimoto, Chiaki Shirai, Мамору Хосода, 細田 守, 细田 守 - **Elsewhere:** https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q720771, https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0396074/, https://www.themoviedb.org/person/81718 ## Streaming the US now - **HBO Max:** [*Wolf Children*](https://film.one/film/wolf-children.md) (81) For United States; add `?region=XX` for another country. ## Fi1m on Mamoru Hosoda > Mamoru Hosoda draws people flat and clean against backgrounds painted almost to photography, then lets a dozen years go past them. His patience with family time is rare in animation, and his women are asked to give more than he ever asks them to want. A young mother stands in a street with a feverish child, halfway between the children's clinic and the vet, and cannot move. That is the scene in *Wolf Children* (2012) where Mamoru Hosoda's method is easiest to see. The joke arrives first. The loneliness arrives a second later, when it is plain there is nobody she can ring. He draws his people flat, in clean lines and hardly any shadow, and sets them against backgrounds painted so carefully that a failed vegetable patch looks wet. The effect is of cut-outs moving through a real place, and he has trusted it for years. He began at Toei Animation in 1991 as an animator, having studied oil painting rather than animation, and made his name on short *Digimon* films at the turn of the century. There was a brief attachment to *Howl's Moving Castle* at Studio Ghibli that did not stick, then two features at Madhouse, *The Girl Who Leapt Through Time* (2006) and *Summer Wars* (2009), the second of them his first original story. In 2011 he founded Studio Chizu with the producer Yuichiro Saito, and every feature since has come from there: *Wolf Children*, *The Boy and the Beast* (2015), *Mirai* (2018), *Belle* (2021) and *Scarlet* (2025). Satoko Okudera wrote three of them with him. What he does well is time. *Wolf Children* covers the dozen years after a widow takes her two half-wolf children to a derelict farmhouse in the mountains, and it is built from small exact things: books on infant care stacked beside books on wolf behaviour, a howl at bedtime that must not be heard. The sequence in the snow moved us more than a film about wolves had any business doing, and it did so because Shigeru Nishiyama's cutting never stops to point at what is happening. What he does less well is the courtship. The Tokyo section hurries Hana and her wolf into parenthood in near-silent montage over Masakatsu Takagi's piano, and we had not yet decided whether we believed in them. Our larger reservation is Hana herself. She smiles through the debt and the failed crops and the nights up with a sick child, and she is never once angry. Hosoda told an interviewer in 2013 that he prefers female protagonists because marriage and raising children "play bigger parts in the lives of women, leaving more space for artistic creation". The space, it turns out, is his rather than hers. Most critics have taken the film's talk of endless sacrifice as praise; we think it is the one thing holding him back from something better than very good. There is also occasional talk that the later films are more conventionally built than the early shorts. Start with *Wolf Children*, at home, where its quiet has room. Then watch what the women in the later films are allowed to want, because that is where we will know whether he has moved. ## Biography Mamoru Hosoda is a Japanese film director, animator and screenwriter. He was born on 19 September 1967 in Kamiichi, Nakaniikawa District, Toyama. He studied oil painting at Kanazawa College of Art and began working in animation at Toei Animation in 1991. Hosoda gained attention in the early 2000s with *Digimon Adventure* (1999) and *Digimon: The Movie* (2000). He later directed *The Girl Who Leapt Through Time* (2006), *Summer Wars* (2009) and *Wolf Children* (2012), for which he also wrote the screenplay. In 2011 he co-founded Studio Chizu. Subsequent films include *The Boy and the Beast* (2015), *Mirai* (2018), which received an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature, *Belle* (2021) and *Scarlet* (2025). *Sources: en.wikipedia.org, imdb.com.* ## On Fi1m (1) - *Wolf Children* (2012), Fi1m 81, Director, Screenplay — [page](https://film.one/film/wolf-children.md) ## Also known for - *The Girl Who Leapt Through Time* (2006), Director - *The Boy and the Beast* (2015), Director, Original Story, Screenplay - *Summer Wars* (2009), Director, Original Story - *Belle* (2021), Director, Screenplay, Original Story - *Mirai* (2018), Director, Writer, Original Story - *Digimon: The Movie* (2000), Director - *One Piece: Baron Omatsuri and the Secret Island* (2005), Director - *Scarlet* (2025), Director, Screenplay, Original Story --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/person/mamoru-hosoda