Mime (lost 3-minute pilot film for cancelled anime film; 1988-1990)

Animage magazine, May of 1989 issue, featuring Mime on the cover.

Status: Lost

Mime (written as 舞夢 in the title and pronounced as まいむ: Maimu) is a cancelled anime film by Shoji Kawamori as director and Haruhiko Mikimoto as character designer, both mostly famous for their work on mecha anime franchises such as Super Dimension Fortress Macross (better known in Western audiences under the localized title Robotech) that they created. It was announced as early as 1988 and had its last updates in 1990.

In contrast to Macross, Mime was going to be a more "grounded", slice-of-life anime about the titular teenage girl and her adventures riding her bicycle, but still with supernatural elements.

Premise

According to producer Masuo Ueda, the plot would have been as follows:

“The protagonist, Maimu, is an extremely energetic, carefree 15-year-old girl. But she isn’t the trendy type of girl we see a lot in modern times. In fact, she has a rough-and-tumble, troublemaker air about her. The story setting isn’t very complicated either, having charming characters in an easy-to-understand story, and while it’s set in present-day, it has sci-fi elements as well. Still, nothing like robots appear…"

Mime would be a country girl leaving her village to live in the city, doing many odd jobs helping people and riding around on her bicycle. She would learn about a legendary lost treasure with the power to change the world. The supporting cast would include a cameraman sidekick alongside a young boy her age called Takeshi who'd actually be possessed by a being from another dimension also searching for the treasure.

The executive producer also wanted music to play an important role in the film.

Shoji Kawamori was reportedly inspired by a real-life meeting with a girl who rode her bicycle for more than 310 miles after sabotaging the power supplies of her village because she was annoyed at her friends staying indoors playing video games. He originally thought of the story being about a boy using an anti-gravity pendant that made his bicycle fly, rescuing a princess and journeying to a space palace called Dockingham; he later scrapped this idea after finding it too similar to E.T. The Extraterrestrial and Laputa: Castle in the Sky.

Cancellation

After 1990, a pilot film for Mime was reportedly completed (apparently lasting only 3 minutes), but the movie was never officially finished, having been quietly cancelled.

In a 2019 interview with The Japan Times, Shoji Kawamori gave an explanation for the cancellation: "Around the same time, there were a couple titles released that had a similar feeling, so we decided not to do it. It wouldn’t have felt original."

It has been thought that the release of Hayao Miyazaki's Kiki’s Delivery Service in 1989 was a deciding factor, being a very popular anime film also centering on a teenage girl's coming-of-age adventures riding a peculiar vehicle alongside supernatural elements, and Mime would have suffered comparisons.

Availability

To this day, no footage or screencaps of this pilot have been made available. Miscellaneous illustrations and concept art by Haruhiko Mikimoto in magazine previews subsist (some of it resembling the style of an anime cel), alongside an artbook.

Other production material had been sold on auction websites, such as model sheets, but only some low-quality preview images are available and the current owners didn't share higher resolution versions.