Stars Align Anime's Director Shares Updates on Sequel Plans

Stars Align anime director Kazuki Akane reported on Twitter on Tuesday that he has been unable to find a company willing to fund the production of a sequel to the series. However, he is still planning to make episodes 13-24 of the anime someday.

Akane adds that the 13th episode will help viewers understand the "Special Fan Movie's" new footage that is set two years after the anime's finale. Akane clarified that there are no plans for a full-length feature movie.

The "Special Fan Movie" short premiered in May 2020. The "memorial promotional video" with new footage is set two years after the television anime's finale, when Maki Katsuragi, Tōma Shinjō, and others are now in high school. The short is the fourth entry in the website's "Production Note" column that promotes the anime's home video release.

Akane had said on Twitter in December 2019 that the series' story would continue in some form, although not necessarily as an anime. The series was originally planned with 24 episodes, and the TV anime's ending reflects that structure.

Stars Align premiered in October 2019, and it ran for 12 episodes. Akane (Escaflowne series and film, Code Geass: Akito the Exiled, Birdy the Mighty: Decode, Noein - to your other self) directed the anime at 8-Bit, and also supervised and wrote the series scripts. The teen adolescence story revolves around the coming of age of boys in a junior high school's soft tennis team, which is on the verge of shutting down.

The anime also received a "special collaboration movie" that began streaming on TBS Animation's YouTube channel in March 2020. That promotional video brought together the anime's ending theme "Kago no Naka no Bokura wa" (We Inside a Cage) and its singer AIKI from Bless4 with dancer Melochin, who provided the choreography for the song's dance sequence. The video was filmed at Bless4's studio space for the Stars Align home video release. The anime's second home video volume included the "special collaboration movie" and a making-of video when it shipped in April 2020.

Source: Kazuki Akane's Twitter account