Anime cinema is about to get a jolt of pure spectacle. CloverWorks — the studio behind some of the most visually ambitious TV productions of recent years — is teaming up with director Atsushi Nishigori for Grotesqqque, an anthology feature that the newly released trailer suggests will lean hard into visual excess.
Nishigori is no newcomer to high-stakes animation. He served as chief animation director on Shin Evangelion the Movie, and that pedigree shows. The trailer trades in the kind of dense, kinetic imagery that made the final Evangelion film such a technical showcase, promising a project built for the biggest screen you can find.
Rather than a single narrative, Grotesqqque is structured as three standalone stories, each with its own tone and title:
- ÆLIENS
- 4649GIRL
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The anthology format is a bold move. It lets Nishigori and the CloverWorks animation team swing between wildly different aesthetics and moods within a single sitting — an approach that rewards experimentation but demands consistency in craft across all three segments. On the evidence of the trailer, the studio is treating each story as its own set piece rather than a quick vignette.
The film gets its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in Montreal, running from July 16 to August 2, 2026. Fantasia has long been a natural home for genre-forward and animation-driven work, making it a fitting launchpad for something as deliberately outlandish as Grotesqqque.
Japanese audiences won’t have to wait much longer after that: the film is set for a theatrical release in Japan on November 6, 2026. Between the festival bow and the wide release, Grotesqqque is positioning itself as one of the more talked-about original anime films of the year — not an adaptation of an existing manga or franchise, but a fresh creative swing from a director with the technical chops to back up his ambitions.
What makes the project worth watching isn’t just the CloverWorks polish or Nishigori’s Evangelion credentials. It’s the willingness to build a theatrical anime around an anthology structure at all — a format that studios rarely gamble on for a big-screen original. If the three stories land, Grotesqqque could make a compelling case that anime cinema still has room for the strange, the stylized and the unapologetically spectacular.
