Falling in Love Through a Robot, Somewhere in 2060

After Your Name, the anime theatrical film became something people outside the existing fandom started tracking. Makoto Shinkai’s 2016 time-travel romance crossed over in a way that felt earned—it had the emotional ambition and visual precision of the best festival cinema, just animated. Since then, everyone’s been watching for the next one that might do the same thing.

A strong candidate is I Fall in Love with You Through a Robot, based on Yusuke Yamada’s science fiction novel 僕はロボットごしの君に恋をする. The setting is Tokyo in 2060, just before the city hosts its third Olympic Games. A scientist named Takeru Ohsawa develops feelings for his colleague Saki Amano while working at a company that builds humanoid robots. Then terrorists mark her as a target, and Takeru has to protect her, the company, and the city all at once.

It’s a classic structure—love story inside a thriller—but near-future Tokyo as an anime setting has a long and mostly excellent track record, and the premise has enough going on that it could land somewhere genuinely interesting. If it carries even a fraction of the emotional precision that made Your Name work, it’ll be worth the wait.