#No Funding For Stars Align Continuation Yet, Says Director

No company willing to fund the continuation to the soft tennis anime series Stars Align has been found yet, its director and writer Akane Kazuki revealed.

Kazuki, who also directed 1996’s The Vision of Escaflowne and its 2000 movie retelling, shared the information in an English Twitter thread for overseas fans, in which he wrote about the continuation for the anime and provided clarifications for some of his previous Japanese tweets.

“I’m very sorry to say that I still haven’t found a production company or a company willing to fund the production of the sequel to “Stars Align”,” Kazuki wrote. “Therefore, I have not yet been able to gather the animators to produce “Stars Align”.”

However, he added that he was “preparing to make episodes 13 to 24 someday.”

In the thread, Kazuki also clarified that Stars Align will not receive a full-length movie continuation as some overseas fans believed, and that the special fan movie that was released in 2020 was made out of scenes from the 13th episode’s scenario that he had completed. Kazuki said that the special fan movie was made “so that fans of ‘StarsAlign’ who couldn’t watch the rest of episode12 could get a sense of the main characters after that.”

“Why did the story suddenly start two years later, and what happened to the story of Maki and Toma that was directly connected to episode 12? I plan to make it so that you can understand it when you watch the completed episode 13,” Kazuki wrote.

Stars Align was first broadcast in 2019. The anime, which had 8bit in charge of the animation production, ran for 12 episodes and ended on a cliffhanger. In December 2019, Kazuki (via Anime News Network) tweeted that the anime was meant to have 24 episodes with a second cour airing three months after the first. 

“In spring, there was a last-minute change in the schedule to make the show 12 episodes long, but we’ve been working on this anime for over two years, and the animation production was already proceeding, so I deemed it impossible to turn it into a 12 episode structure at that juncture,” Kazuki was quoted as saying. “Thus, we made 12 episodes with the 24 episode structure intact.”

Hulu describes the show as:

Toma Shinjou has one mission: save his school’s tennis team. And his only hope rests on the racket of Maki Katsuragi, who’s reluctant to part from his studies. This will be the team’s last summer together unless they convince Maki to step on the court!