Aurora Engineer
AIMDb Rating
93K
Your Rating
Popularity
8
“What the sky remembers, the engineer must answer.”
On a near-future Tokyo orbital platform, a teenage apprentice maintains the aurora projection system that gives the colony its artificial sky. When the projectors begin failing in patterns that match an old folk song her grandmother used to sing, she follows the malfunctions down into the station's forgotten lower decks. What she finds there challenges everything she has been told about why the colony was built.
- Director
- Takeshi Hidaka
- Writers
- Takeshi Hidaka · Yuriko Asano
- Stars
- Akiko Yashiro · Hiro Mitarai · Ren Sugiyama ›
Top Cast (5)
Akiko Yashiro
Hana Tachibana (voice)
Hiro Mitarai
Engineer Kaito (voice)
Ren Sugiyama
Commander Endo (voice)
Mariko Tateishi
Aunt Sayuri (voice)
Junpei Watanabe
Old Man Sato (voice)
User Reviews
5 reviewsAn overlooked masterpiece
by anime_archivist
Hidaka uses the artificial sky as a metaphor without ever underlining it. The hand-drawn animation is staggering even by 1989 standards, and the folk-song motif binds every plot beat together. This deserves to be mentioned alongside the era's giants.
Gorgeous hand-drawn craft
by cellpainter_fan
Every background looks painted with real love. The lower-deck sequences feel genuinely claustrophobic and the aurora panels glow in a way digital animation has never quite recaptured. Story drags slightly in the second act but the climax pays off.
Lovely but slow
by genre_purist
Visually it's a knockout, but the pacing is patient to the point of testing patience. I admired more than I enjoyed it. Worth seeing once for the art, maybe not twice for the plot.
I cried at the ending
by summer_film_club
Didn't expect a sci-fi anime about a maintenance worker to wreck me, but here we are. The relationship between Hana and her late grandmother is handled with such restraint. A small, perfect film.
Quietly philosophical
by ozu_disciple
The film keeps asking what we owe the architecture of our own comfort. It doesn't always have an answer, which I appreciated. Akiko Yashiro's voice work is the kind of subtle that wins no awards and deserves all of them.
Details
- Release date
- July 22, 1989 (Japan)
- Country of origin
- Japan
- Language
- Japanese
- Also known as
- オーロラ・エンジニア · Ōrora Enjinia · L'Ingénieur de l'Aurore
- Filming locations
- Studio Lapis Pictures, Suginami, Tokyo, Japan · Akabane Animation Production, Kita, Tokyo, Japan
- Production companies
- Studio Lapis Pictures · Tobi Films · Yamashita Entertainment Group
Box office
- Budget
- $3,400,000 (estimated)
- Opening weekend US & Canada
- $32,000
- Gross US & Canada
- $218,000
- Gross worldwide
- $4,870,000
Technical specs
- Runtime
- 1h 48m
- Color
- Color
- Sound mix
- Dolby Digital
- Aspect ratio
- 2.39 : 1
