Detective Conan: Fallen Angel of the Highway opens at GSC on 5 September, with a Chiikawa fan screening the next day

Two of Japan's biggest animated films of the year land on the same GSC weekend. The chain's own film page lists Detective Conan The Movie: FAOTH from Saturday 5 September as a fans' screening, and this site's listings show a Chiikawa the Movie fan screening on sale for Sunday 6 September at six GSC cinemas. One is a 110-minute police chase through Yokohama; the other is a film about hamster-like creatures that Malay Mail calls a dystopia in a deceptively adorable package.

The Conan film first

GSC's page gives the running time as 1 hour 50 minutes, in Japanese with English subtitles, and credits Takahiro Hasui as director, with Minami Takayama, Wakana Yamazaki, Rikiya Koyama, Miyuki Sawashiro and Akio Otsuka among the voice cast. The initials stand for Fallen Angel of the Highway, and the synopsis explains why: at a motorcycle festival in Yokohama a new police motorcycle called 'Angel' is unveiled, just as a rogue black bike of almost identical design, nicknamed 'Lucifer', begins appearing. The traffic officer Chihaya Hagiwara pursues it while memories of her late brother surface.

GSC's page does not name a distributor or give a classification, and as of this writing the film carries no rating in the chains' listings, which is usual for a title days before its opening. It is on sale at one cinema in this site's listings so far, with the Saturday sessions showing on the Detective Conan page; more cinemas will appear as GSC adds them. A fans' screening is an event first and a run second: the Saturday sessions are the ones on sale, and the ones to book.

Chiikawa: ¥2.24 billion, and a warning for parents

Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of the Mermaid Island has been in Malaysian cinemas since 20 August and is still on at 44 cinemas this week, at GSC and TGV. Malay Mail's Erna Mahyuni reviewed it on 21 August and reported the Japanese numbers behind the fan interest: ¥990 million on opening day, and 1,508,500 tickets sold from Friday to Sunday for a ¥2.24 billion opening weekend, while Spider-Man led the box office everywhere else.

The characters, drawn from Nagano's webcomics and voiced in the film by the original series cast, are the hamster-like Chiikawa, Hachiware the cat that insists it is not a cat, and the rabbit Usagi. The film is rated P12 here, and Malay Mail's review explains the number: it describes heavy subject matter and scary moments beneath the cute surface, and calls it a story about crime and consequences wrapped in adorable animation. A parent booking for a six-year-old on the strength of the poster should read that review first.

The fan screening on 6 September is a GSC special event; this site lists it as a separate title so that its sessions are not confused with the regular run.

Where to look

The regular Chiikawa sessions are on its film page, and the fan screening has a Chiikawa fan screening page of its own. Both films are Japanese-language with English subtitles, and both, like most anime releases in Malaysia, are at GSC and TGV rather than the smaller chains, so the showtimes page filtered to Chiikawa is the quickest way to find the nearest one.