Director: Yoshiyuki Momose
Rudger exists because a lonely girl named Amanda needed a friend, and for a while that is enough — until the real world intrudes and threatens to erase him entirely.
What is The Imaginary about?
Amanda spends her days dreaming up entire worlds, and Rudger is the companion those dreams produced: patient, curious, and only visible to her. Their private universe of pirate ships and jungle chases holds together until an unsettling stranger begins hunting imaginary friends who have outlived the children who made them. Separated from Amanda and thrown into an unfamiliar city, Rudger stumbles into a hidden refuge where forgotten imaginary companions gather, wait, and sometimes find new children to belong to. The film tracks his search for a way back to Amanda alongside a widening cast of imaginary beings, each shaped by a different child's mind, while the threat closing in forces Rudger to decide what happens to an imaginary friend once the person who dreamed him up moves on.
Cast & crew
Studio Ponoc, the animation house founded by veterans of Studio Ghibli, built the Japanese-language version around young lead Kokoro Terada as Amanda and Rio Suzuki voicing Rudger, with Sakura Ando, Riisa Naka, Takayuki Yamada, Atsuko Takahata, Issey Ogata and Akira Terao filling out the supporting cast of imaginary friends and adult characters.
Context & significance
Yoshiyuki Momose directs from a script adapted from a British illustrated novel with the same premise, and the film carries the hand-drawn texture Studio Ponoc has favored since its first features, mixing painterly backgrounds with a story that treats childhood imagination as something with real stakes and real cost. Released in 2024, it sits in Studio Ponoc's small but attentive catalog of family-oriented fantasy, aimed at viewers who grew up on Ghibli-adjacent storytelling but told through a Western source story reworked for Japanese animation.
Where & how to watch
The Imaginary streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so it can be watched either way depending on preference. A free K-Time account is all that's needed to sign in and start watching; the film's page here, including this write-up, is open to read without logging in. K-Time's Farsi-first interface is built for households streaming from outside Iran, making it simple to queue this up alongside other animated titles for family viewing.