Special Report: Linda Linda Linda (2005)

and hopefully digital pretty darn soon. I had a chance to see it a few years ago on a not that great DVD, so I'm super excited that this is getting a restoration and more people will have a chance to see it. It is a lot of fun, and I hope you have fun listening to this interview. Can you give me a little bit of your background.

film studies and sort of the rest was history. It was through that department that I met the president of our company, Dave Jestett, who I think was also an alumnus of the film studies program there, And I got an internship at che Kids back in twenty thirteen, which at the time was really focused on these sort of prestige animated films, you know, the Secret of Kel's at cat and Paris, Chico and Rita, and had made a

name for itself on that stuff. And then basically I had been hired to help handle you know, repertory screenings. At the time, we had just taken over theatrical rights for the Gibley Catalog, and so I was managing the theatrical tour of those thirty five milimeter prints before they were digitized into DCPs and stuff. So I've been at the company ever since, and I've seen it grow from there.

But in terms of me personally, basically, I've been at the company long enough that it is sort of me so there you go.

long story short. The CEO of the current CEO, Eric Beckman, founded the company as a kind of spin off of a festival he'd been running since the nineties, the New York International Children's Film Festival. So when I joined, the two companies were essentially the same still, but around twenty thirteen twenty fourteen, the technically or i guess more formally split. The festival still runs as its own nonprofit, the ge Kids became its own standalone for profit distribution entity, and

we basically made it work for a really long time. Basically, it's just compared to these sort of billionaire own, venture capital backed independent companies, we were really scrappy and for a long time we were about four to seven people, and around twenty eighteen we started to work more in the anime space, and I think that'll facilitated a broader range of projects for us to work on, and we brought on a lot more people, and about a year

ago October of twenty twenty four, the company formerly sold to Toho in Japan, and it's still fully autonomous, but we now report into the bigger Toho conglomerate and it's a period. I guess you could call them sort of cousin companies that kind of exist inside of it. But mostly everything has basically stayed the same, and we're just handling Toho projects that we probably would have been bidding on.

I'm part to talk about Linda Linda Linda. We've handled a theatrical re release of the End of Evangelion from Pidiaki Ano Memorro she goes from Michelle Too Innocence, and then in addition to that, we do a lot of

European film still. So last year we did Mars Express from Jeremie perm and Chicken for Linda from Sbastian Loden Book and Kira Malta, and so trying to like basically keep a little bit of balance in there, because she Kids's mission initially was really about the best animation from all around the world, and so we still try to live up to that where we can.

time with periodic repertory screenings. I believe Japan Society held some a few years ago, and we ended up working on one of the director's most recent films, What's Happened to be animated called ghostcat Onto, and so you mashed us On had work together with an animator, Yoko Kuno, to basically create I mean, it's like a slacker in D comedy and it's shot like one but it's used as rotoscoping in a really innovative way, and so it's kind of like it's like a Totuo esque but it

has a lot of the same sort of endi comedy vibe that you would expect from the director. And so I think that that basically like when we started handling that, we thought, wouldn't it be like a great idea to work on the Liland Linda or re release that, and then that's in the post us and we said, we'd absolutely love to kind of work on this, and it's

not totally without precedent. Earlier this year we did Anna's Love and Pop, which was filn from the late nineties that Anno had worked on, and so there was a little bit of, oh, if you know this director from their animated work, we can carry that audience with us into live action. But I expect that we'll continue to

work on developing this vertical for sure. I think it's a really special film with a kind of I don't know, like a fundamental elemental power that like sticks with people over time, which is why I think it's developed this reputation.

And I think a lot of people who have seen it on DVD because it sort of like came out and peaked DVD era, I think you'll be really surprised when you revisit it in the restoration because it's just it looks really, really gorgeous in a way that I was put off guard by the first time I saw the restored version.

of like leaves you with that last impression. And so when you're watching it or when you're rewatching it, part of the anticipation of that moment is just so much a part of the experience, and I think lends itself to like the act of rewatching or the act of reexperiencing, but also like to your point, there's like a kind of nostalgia for this kind of moment in youth where everything as a sort of special, like I said, like

an elemental power to it. And I feel like the film like captures that in microcosm, and that kind of gives it this unique quality.

repertory oriented. Like I said, we've been in that space from the beginning, because a lot of what I was doing when I joined the company was managing like touring retrospectives. But being able to enter the DVD and Blu Ray market with such heavy hitters I think really helped the company grow. Speaking personally, a lot of what I was working on twenty twenty one was like the sort of low key, I guess you could call it, like the

life support cinema experience. So working on the ASCOL releases of films like Wolf Walkers and Earwig in the Win which as much as I could, and then separately working on a like a direct sale store online like online e commerce play. And we had taken over the rights for Neon Genesis Evangelian at that time, and so we had this luxurious, you know, ultimate edition that we were putting out to the market, but also just regular additions

that were selling pretty well. Evangelian hadn't been available on a commercial DVD at that point, and probably fifteen twenty years since the platinum sets, I still have a lot of build brinds who are very possessive of their platinum DVD sets of HUT series. But there's a whole new generation, speaking of Linda, Linda, Linda, there's a whole new generation of people who like really appreciate the ability to access these things or to own them, as opposed to just

having them on streaming. Evangelian obviously maybe a huge splash when it went direct to Netflix, and that's like how I'd say the broader public has encountered it these days. But the Blue Rays sets are nice.

or however you see it. And then my colleague Allison Cosberg, who oversees home media, is put together some really amazing products over the years, follow our stuff like the Misaki Yuasa five film box set, the aforementioned Evangelian box sets, and then We've also been working on Arcane, which is the fourtiesh television show for Netflix, and Riot, the being developer for League of Legends, and we have some really

awesome products there as well. So I say that because I can't take credit for I can take credit for purchasing them myself. So there you go.

of weird way. She's a Belgian girl growing up in Japan and basically reconciling with this idea that she doesn't really belong there or is otherwise, you know, a foreign presence, I guess, in a weird way. It does tie in a little bit to Linda Linda Linda in the sense of overcoming a language barrier or a cultural divide and

finding out who you are. But it's a really tremendous film from the studio that did Calamity and Long Way North, and so it's got this really cool, flat graphic style, but it's got a surprising amount of depth and shine to it for something like that, it's very different from like the graphic style people associated with quote Unook cartoons. And because of the literary source material, it's got a lot of like screenplay depth that I think is really

uncommon among animated films generally speaking. That's our big kind of prestige full title. And then, like I said, we have a lot going on in the anime space as well. We're working on the fortieth anniversary re release of Angels Egg from Amroshi and Yoshtaka Amano, and we released the poster and trailer for that a few weeks ago and not got just amazing traction. That's a film similar to Linda Linda Linda in terms of a long, long cult status, a long period of on a availability, and it's a

lifelong gamer. I've always loved Yaka Amano's arts for Final Fantasy, and so it's a great privilege to be working on the film, and I think it'll have surprising traction, probably in theaters for a seventy two minute film from forty years ago. I think younger viewers today really want to be challenged by films. I feel like Angels Egg is like a real proving ground for that. Our big November released this.

I guess that's true for any film company, but especially like the types of films that we're handling have this like strong aesthetic pool to them that people just really love to get into the replies on and I love our social team. I think they do a really great job of curating looks from the wide variety of films that we're handling, both I guess animated and live action films as we start to incorporate those as well.