Release CalendarTop 250 MoviesMost Popular MoviesBrowse Movies by GenreTop Box OfficeShowtimes & TicketsMovie NewsIndia Movie Spotlight
    What's on TV & StreamingTop 250 TV ShowsMost Popular TV ShowsBrowse TV Shows by GenreTV News
    What to WatchLatest TrailersIMDb OriginalsIMDb PicksIMDb SpotlightFamily Entertainment GuideIMDb Podcasts
    OscarsCannes Film FestivalStar WarsAsian Pacific American Heritage MonthSummer Watch GuideSTARmeter AwardsAwards CentralFestival CentralAll Events
    Born TodayMost Popular CelebsCelebrity News
    Help CenterContributor ZonePolls
For Industry Professionals
  • Language
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Watchlist
Sign In
Sign In
New Customer? Create account
  • Fully supported
  • English (United States)
    Partially supported
  • Français (Canada)
  • Français (France)
  • Deutsch (Deutschland)
  • हिंदी (भारत)
  • Italiano (Italia)
  • Português (Brasil)
  • Español (España)
  • Español (México)
Use app
  • Cast & crew
  • User reviews
  • Trivia
  • FAQ
IMDbPro

The Sky Crawlers

Original title: Sukai kurora
  • 2008
  • PG-13
  • 2h 2m
IMDb RATING
6.7/10
6K
YOUR RATING
The Sky Crawlers (2008)
1st trailer for this visually stunning, animated war film
Play trailer1:08
1 Video
99+ Photos
Adult AnimationAnimeAnimationDramaSci-FiWar

The Kildren, a group of eternally young fighter pilots, experience the sudden loss of innocence as they battle the enemy in astonishing dogfights above the clouds.The Kildren, a group of eternally young fighter pilots, experience the sudden loss of innocence as they battle the enemy in astonishing dogfights above the clouds.The Kildren, a group of eternally young fighter pilots, experience the sudden loss of innocence as they battle the enemy in astonishing dogfights above the clouds.

  • Director
    • Mamoru Oshii
  • Writers
    • Hiroshi Mori
    • Chihiro Itô
  • Stars
    • Rinko Kikuchi
    • Ryô Kase
    • Shôsuke Tanihara
  • See production info at IMDbPro
  • IMDb RATING
    6.7/10
    6K
    YOUR RATING
    • Director
      • Mamoru Oshii
    • Writers
      • Hiroshi Mori
      • Chihiro Itô
    • Stars
      • Rinko Kikuchi
      • Ryô Kase
      • Shôsuke Tanihara
    • 41User reviews
    • 54Critic reviews
  • See production info at IMDbPro
    • Awards
      • 6 wins & 5 nominations total

    Videos1

    The Sky Crawlers
    Trailer 1:08
    The Sky Crawlers

    Photos166

    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    View Poster
    + 162
    View Poster

    Top cast47

    Edit
    Rinko Kikuchi
    Rinko Kikuchi
    • Suito Kusanagi
    • (voice)
    Ryô Kase
    Ryô Kase
    • Yuichi Kannami
    • (Japanese version)
    • (voice)
    Shôsuke Tanihara
    Shôsuke Tanihara
    • Naofumi Tokino
    • (voice)
    Megumi Yamaguchi
    • Mizuki Kusanagi
    • (voice)
    Daisuke Hirakawa
    • Aizu Yudagawa
    • (voice)
    Takuma Takewaka
    • Uroyuki Shinoda
    • (voice)
    Mugihito
    • Kyoku Yama
    • (voice)
    Hôchû Ôtsuka
    Hôchû Ôtsuka
    • Honda
    • (voice)
    Mabuki Andô
    • Fooco
    • (voice)
    Mako Hyôdô
    Mako Hyôdô
    • Kusmi
    • (voice)
    Hiro Shimono
    Hiro Shimono
    • Pilot
    • (voice)
    Yoshinori Fujita
    • Pilot
    • (voice)
    Ayumu Hasegawa
    • Pilot
    • (voice)
    Oki Sugiyama
    • Pilot
    • (voice)
    Fumie Mizusawa
    • Call Girl
    • (voice)
    Tomomi Watanabe
    • Call Girl
    • (voice)
    Ken'ichi Mochizuki
    • Mechanic
    • (Japanese version)
    • (voice)
    Ian Moore
    • Public Figure
    • (voice)
    • Director
      • Mamoru Oshii
    • Writers
      • Hiroshi Mori
      • Chihiro Itô
    • All cast & crew
    • Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

    User reviews41

    6.76K
    1
    2
    3
    4
    5
    6
    7
    8
    9
    10

    Featured reviews

    7juliankennedy23

    The Sky Crawlers... The English Patient the Anime

    The Sky Crawlers: (Sukai Kurora):7 out of 10: This is an adult anime...In fact this is a very adult anime. No there isn’t copious amounts of fan service or blood. (In fact the film is rated PG-13 primarily for smoking.) Instead Sky Crawlers has a very quiet, reserved pacing. It’s a two hour anime that feels like it clocks in at over three hours. Not boring per se but very deliberately paced with adult conversations, adult music and an overall adult tone that reminds one of Before Sunrise with occasional airborne dogfight to break up the relationship introspection.

    The plot is both light (I will reveal that here) and quite heavy (I will let the movie itself surprise you with its philosophical underpinnings). On the light side is there is a special group of teenagers who are pilots that never grow old. The movie refers to them as Kildren and much is made of how they are just kids; but if you drive, fly, have sex, drink, and smoke a pack every 10 minutes of screen time your are at best a teen and in reality a young adult.

    These Kildren fight in retro WW2 style aircraft against each other in an air war with no winners and no other casualties all to apparently satiate the public’s need for conflict. (Think Star Trek’s “A Taste of Armageddon”). There is a new pilot, a wingman and a couple of androgynous love interests with deep secret pasts. There is even a Red Baron character rumored to be an adult and a constant source of tension and conversation in both the dogfights and on the ground.

    The Animation is simply awe inspiring. The CGI work is better than many a Hollywood blockbuster and the 2 dimensional cell shaded characters fit both the pacing and the mood of the film. The attention to detail is quite amazing overall.

    Overall the film is recommended for fans of adult drama and serious anime. I do confess I did wish for longer sky battles, more realistic violence and even some fan service. It is ironic that one of the most adult anime I have ever seen suffers from a lack of adult thrills with its PG-13 rating.
    7kosmasp

    Patience

    This movie is really quite good, especially the idea behind it all. If you are aware of Animes and Manga comics, then you might expect, the movie to be how it is. But if not, be prepared to get a whole lot of story. It might be too much for some audience members and you might not get everything with the first viewing. Now this either will get you hooked and you will watch the movie again or you will hate the movie and rate it badly.

    Depending on what you think you can take, it should be up to you to decide if you want to watch it. If you do, you will be confronted with quite some interesting question (not all of which get an answer at all), that might inspire you to think some things over, that you take for granted.
    7Cat-Wings

    What is the Meaning of Life as KillDren: It's worth watching the beautiful views

    "The Sky Crawlers" is directed by Mamoru Oshii, the 56-year-old genius director. He lets go of the screenplay this time and presents a fresh front by introducing a new scriptwriter, Chihiro Ito.

    The most anticipated aspect of this film for fans of Hiroshi Mori, the author of the original novel, is how the director has translated the original into the medium of film. The original is like a poem where you can clearly see his vision with a lots of space in the sentences. It's also a challenge to decide on what extend the truth of the story is to be visible which was less clear in the original novel.

    KillDren - Living weapons which never grew up, kept as adolescents their entire lives and created to show people a performance called a "war".

    Once again, the film treats the dominant theme of the conflict between "humans" and "AI made by humans". However, the story has an appeal which is different from "Ghost In The Shell" or "Innocence".

    Humans who do not know about wars; breeding, killing people, depriving family, or being full of hatred. They wish for peace, and exhausted by all the efforts which end in endless tragedy and death. The wars as a form of entertainment is a way to look directly at such concepts, and is a way to create a distance from such tragedies. The wars what make them recognise once more what they are truly happy about, by peeping at this extreme hopelessness.

    Certainly, humans are greedy creatures and they expect that the safe and peaceful situation will continue and this would be fine without knowing whether they are truly happy. They still want to their further happiness because they are not satisfied with this situation. It is the moment that they realise they are actually happy, by recognising the position where they stand at the hierarchy of the society they live in and comparing it with others. It is through having wars as entertainment that people venture to create.

    Meanwhile, there are girls and boys who only find their lives worth living in the sky, laughing in the sky, crying in the sky and killing other people using their right hands as Living weapons. KillDren, who love people, become puzzled with the truth, have some self confidence and sometimes are fragile. It is the same life as normal adolescent girls and boys, except they are weapons and never grow.

    This is a story which tells us about what the truly important things in life are, and to see them living in our world and time.

    Notes: Please watch till the end of the story even after the ending credit starts. The last scene will give you a hint to the secret of the story.
    6ethSin

    Great story and concept, poor execution

    I found the view of wars as an instrument to remind us of what it means to be peaceful to be an interesting idea. The concept of Killdre who can't (won't?) become adults were also quite interesting, but I felt they could've done much more with this story.

    Throughout the film, the main character repeated that there were no reason to become adults, but what was the real difference between childhood and adulthood? Children and their immaturity come from inexperience. Even if their bodies never grew up, wouldn't their minds continue to grow into an adult? I wish they had explained this more because the Killdre pilots in this movie didn't behave that different compared to adult pilots. To me, it seemed like being children had no real advantages other than better reflexes and lighter weight for the planes.

    They did a fine job with the revival problems of Killdre, that they can't escape the war even through death, but I wished they focused more on the subject.

    Animation on this was quite disastrous in my opinion. In this day and age, many anime series mix 3D-CGI and traditional cel animation. This style of animation never worked for me, since the hand-drawn cel animation seems like laziness behind 3D backgrounds, especially since there were many 'frozen' frames where a character don't move for about 5 seconds. Such wide gap in animation quality within an anime movie seems unnatural, and I believe the CG technology in Japan has not reached a convincing level in anime yet. Some plane fight scenes were quite cool, but the following cel animation in the base always seemed awkward afterwards.

    Truly great animated films in recent years like "Byousoku 5cm" and reputable anime studios like Ghibli and Mad House still use computer graphics only to assist the hand-drawn special effects without using protrusive 3D-CGI in 2-dimensional background or characters. Japanese anime creators need to wait until they have enough budget and technology to match current Pixar films before using CGI in their anime films.

    I really liked the character development in this movie, but I believe this film had a lot of space for improvements.
    8latinmelkor

    A deep film that demands more patience than it should

    As another reviewer wrote earlier, I have little doubt that the film's mediocre rating is due to its slowness in developing the thesis that Mamoru Oshii hides behind the plot. It is a film that demands patience, so much in fact, that I find it directly to blame for the negative reviews. It is not a viewer's fault to lose interest when they have already seen more than half of a film and the fog that shrouds the plot remains as dense as it was at the beginning.

    Nevertheless, with proper time, the doubts and issues that may have seemed incoherent are explained with efficiency and appeal. What initially looks inconsistent, once the viewer is given the background information, makes complete sense. The characters' erratic behavior, the anachronistic war machines, the nonsensical dialogues: it all makes sense in just a few minutes through an almost epiphany.

    The film, very much in Oshii's style, raises philosophical questions revolving around existentialism and the ontology of human beings: what is the role of war in society, are our memories what make us what we are, what is the point of continuing to live day by day? All these questions are treated by the director in a plot that is unnecessarily slow, but still fascinating.

    The Sky Crawlers forced me to reexamine the mindset I have when I watch an anime film. When I sit down to watch these types of works, I expect clichéd characters, fantastically absurd plots and flat thoughts that pretend to have depth. While there are plenty of exceptions, it is undeniable that many anime productions use characters and formulas as predictable as Hollywood blockbusters. The Sky Crawlers, to a prejudiced viewer like me, may at first seem like just another film in the long line of those Japanese animated features that rely more on the beauty of their art than their content. This is not the case. This is a deep and thoughtful work that, sadly, moves at a slower pace than what contemporary moviegoers are used to. I insist: the plot is spectacular and not overly complex, it is just slow.

    More like this

    Patlabor 2: The Movie
    7.5
    Patlabor 2: The Movie
    Avalon
    6.4
    Avalon
    Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer
    7.4
    Urusei Yatsura 2: Beautiful Dreamer
    Patlabor: The Movie
    7.0
    Patlabor: The Movie
    The Murder Case of Hana & Alice
    7.1
    The Murder Case of Hana & Alice
    Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    7.4
    Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
    Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Border 4: Ghost Stands Alone
    7.1
    Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Border 4: Ghost Stands Alone
    Summer Wars
    7.4
    Summer Wars
    WXIII: Patlabor
    6.6
    WXIII: Patlabor
    Chii Tomodachi
    5.6
    Chii Tomodachi
    Angel's Egg
    7.5
    Angel's Egg
    Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Border 3: Ghost Tears
    7.1
    Ghost in the Shell: Arise - Border 3: Ghost Tears

    Storyline

    Edit

    Did you know

    Edit
    • Trivia
      Mamoru Oshii initially wanted the English radio conversations between the pilots to be spoken with difficulty for the sake of realism. However, the voice actors were already fluent enough to understand English, so the script made the conversations into clearer English for easier understanding by the voice actors.
    • Crazy credits
      SPOILER: After the end credits, a new pilot lands at the airbase and introduces himself to Kusanagi in her office. The scene is almost identical to the opening scene but we do not see the pilot's face.
    • Connections
      Referenced in Animation Research for the Sky Crawlers (2009)
    • Soundtracks
      Konya mo Hoshi ni dakarete...
      Performed by Ayaka

      Written by Ayaka

      Composed by Yoshihiko Nishio and Ayaka

    Top picks

    Sign in to rate and Watchlist for personalized recommendations
    Sign in

    FAQ18

    • How long is The Sky Crawlers?Powered by Alexa

    Details

    Edit
    • Release date
      • August 2, 2008 (Japan)
    • Country of origin
      • Japan
    • Official sites
      • Official site (Japan)
      • Warner Bros (Japan)
    • Language
      • Japanese
    • Also known as
      • Những Phi Công Xuất Sắc
    • Production companies
      • Nippon Television Network (NTV)
      • Production I.G.
      • Warner Bros.
    • See more company credits at IMDbPro

    Box office

    Edit
    • Gross worldwide
      • $5,845,516
    See detailed box office info on IMDbPro

    Tech specs

    Edit
    • Runtime
      2 hours 2 minutes
    • Color
      • Color
    • Sound mix
      • DTS-ES
      • Dolby Digital EX
    • Aspect ratio
      • 1.85 : 1

    Related news

    Contribute to this page

    Suggest an edit or add missing content
    The Sky Crawlers (2008)
    Top Gap
    By what name was The Sky Crawlers (2008) officially released in India in English?
    Answer
    • See more gaps
    • Learn more about contributing
    Edit page

    More to explore

    Production art
    Photos
    Hollywood Power Couples
    See the gallery
    Production art
    List
    The Best New and Upcoming Horror
    See our picks
    Production art
    Photos
    Asian Icons of Film and Television
    See the full gallery

    Recently viewed

    Please enable browser cookies to use this feature. Learn more.
    Get the IMDb app
    Sign in for more accessSign in for more access
    Follow IMDb on social
    Get the IMDb app
    For Android and iOS
    Get the IMDb app
    • Help
    • Site Index
    • IMDbPro
    • Box Office Mojo
    • License IMDb Data
    • Press Room
    • Advertising
    • Jobs
    • Conditions of Use
    • Privacy Policy
    • Your Ads Privacy Choices
    IMDb, an Amazon company

    © 1990-2025 by IMDb.com, Inc.