To make “Dragon Heart: Adventures Beyond This World,” director Isamu Imakake forced himself to slow down. Across the more than three-year journey to bring to life this film, which is eligible for Best Animated Feature at the 2026 Academy Awards, Imakake visited a slew of real-world locations (including Tokushima and Kyoto) that inspired both the story and the locations seen in the movie.
“It was a journey of my enlightenment,” Imakake told TheWrap’s Joe McGovern during a virtual screening.
Along the way, he and his team began practicing meditation in a bid to “calm our minds and concentrate our minds so that we can create a better production.”
“This movie is trying to illustrate the world beyond this world, which is after life or after world,” Imakake said via a translator. “Since we can’t go there directly, we had to practice meditations and look within ourselves to be able to experience what kind of world might exist beyond this world.”
A lot of reality went into “Dragon Heart: Adventures Beyond This World,” despite the Japanese animated film’s fantastical premise. The movie follows two teenage cousins, Ryusuke and Tomomi, who, after sinking to the bottom of Japan’s Anabuki River, are rescued by a dragon and taken on a sweeping adventure through the spirit world — more specifically, different sections of hell.
As Ryusuke and Tomomi begin making their way through the afterlife, different hell worlds begin to emulate distinct genres of film: horror, crime and war, to name a few. Imakake called one realm a hell that is “controlled by the fear of people,” where the main characters are most afraid when they know “the real state … of people.”
In another scene, the main characters descend into what Imakake calls a “hell of beasts” where they encounter a snake god who used to be a woman and “thinks that she is actually a god.” Creating this character meant another field trip for Imakake and his team — to study real snakes to get inspiration for the movement and behavior.
To design the film’s central dragon, they had to take a different approach.
“We tried to design a Japanese dragon, and this design we used, it’s a dragon design on the Kotsu temple, which is one of the places that we show in the movie,” Imakake said. “We actually designed this dragon using CGI, but after we created this dragon with CGI, we actually used hand brushing and hand painting to make it look less digital. A rule or concept of the dragon is to protect what’s important.”
“Dragon Heart” features five original songs, which Imakake asked his team to deliver ASAP so they could be more fully incorporated into the film.
“In a sense, they act as a guide for the movie,” he said.
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