India’s Toonz Media Group and Tokyo-based studio Supersub LLC have joined forces to co-produce “The Taste of Water,” an animated feature documentary tracing the history, culture, and future of Japanese sake.
The deal was unveiled at the Annecy Animation Film Festival.
Directed by Riki Ohkanda and executive produced by Ryo Nakajima, the film is currently in production. It follows a road-movie structure divided into five chapters – covering sake’s fundamentals, its history, its relationship with Japanese culture, the pressures the industry now faces, and its potential futures. Through encounters with brewers, historians, artists, distributors, and cultural experts across Japan, the documentary builds its inquiry around a single question: what does it mean for a great sake to taste like water?
The film’s production pipeline is central to its identity. Live-action footage gathered throughout Japan will be converted into anime-influenced visuals using AI-assisted rotoscoping and 3D Gaussian Splatting, a volumetric rendering technique, both developed in-house by Supersub. The hybrid workflow is designed to convey sensory and emotional dimensions of sake culture that conventional documentary formats cannot easily reach.
