

It was screened at the Leeds International Film Festival, Anime Contents Expo and Anime Expo convention, and also won the Animation Film Award at the 66th Annual Mainichi Film Awards. The European premiere of Hotarubi no Mori e was on October 8, 2011 at the Scotland Loves Animation festival, where it won the Jury Prize. The film maintained a strong following for months in Japan after its opening on September 17, 2011. The film starred Japanese voice actors Ayane Sakura and Kōki Uchiyama, and its soundtrack included music by Makoto Yoshimori.

Hotarubi no Mori e is considered a starting point for Midorikawa's best known work, Natsume's Book of Friends.Ī 44-minute anime film with the same title was produced in 2011 at the anime studio Brain's Base and directed by Takahiro Omori. The inspiration to write the story came suddenly to Midorikawa, who immediately drew the manga-a process that went smoothly despite some initial conflicting elements. Hotaru returns every summer to spend time with Gin, and their relationship matures as both struggle with its limitations. Hotaru learns that her friend is supernatural and that touching Gin will cause him to disappear forever. Hotarubi no Mori e tells the story of a young girl named Hotaru and her friendship with Gin, a strange young man wearing a mask, who she meets at the age of six in a mountain forest near her grandfather's country home. It was published in the July 2002 issue of LaLa DX in Japan, and in July 2003 it was reprinted in a tankōbon short story collection of the same name, which included four romantic one-shot stories written by Midorikawa.

Into the Forest of Fireflies' Light) is a one-batzt shoujo manga written by Yuki Midorikawa. Forced across the diverging threads of past and present, Okabe must shoulder the burdens that come with holding the key to the realm of time.Hotarubi no Mori e (蛍火の杜へ, lit. and Nitroplus, Steins Gate takes Okabe through the depths of scientific theory and practicality. Adapted from the critically acclaimed visual novel by 5pb. Though miraculous in itself, the phenomenon doesn't provide anything concrete in Okabe's search for a scientific breakthrough that is, until the lab members are spurred into action by a string of mysterious happenings before stumbling upon an unexpected success-the Phone Microwave can send emails to the past, altering the flow of history. The self-proclaimed mad scientist Rintarou Okabe rents out a room in a rickety old building in Akihabara, where he indulges himself in his hobby of inventing prospective "future gadgets" with fellow lab members: Mayuri Shiina, his air-headed childhood friend, and Hashida Itaru, a perverted hacker nicknamed "Daru." The three pass the time by tinkering with their most promising contraption yet, a machine dubbed the "Phone Microwave," which performs the strange function of morphing bananas into piles of green gel. A young boy, Gin, appears before Hotaru, but she cannot touch him for fear of making him disappear. The story of Hotarubi no Mori e centers around Hotaru, a little girl who gets lost in an enchanted forest where apparitions reside. Based on Yuki Midorikawa's manga of the same name, Hotarubi no Mori e is a tale of friendship and compromise of two people who should never have crossed paths, as their lives become hopelessly intertwined. However, their relationship and resolve are put to the test, when romantic feelings conflict with the one and only rule. Paying no heed to his cautionary words, and despite being separated by both distance and planes of existence, Hotaru and Gin become close friends as she visits him every summer.

In spite of this, Gin leads Hotaru out of the forest and warns her never to return when she promises to come again with a gift. She learns the hard way that she should not touch the boy, or he would disappear. Exhausted and desperate for help, Hotaru is thrilled to find a masked forest spirit named Gin. Intrigued by the tale of a mountain god, six-year-old Hotaru Takegawa loses her way in the ancient forest while visiting her uncle.
