Horror? You might expect something with the title of I Want to Eat Your Pancreas to be about the eating of body parts. Instead it’s an animated terminal-illness weepie, along the lines of The Fault in Our Stars, and though it suffers from the big problem most of these things have – implausibly fragrant decline – it’s cute, well animated, and interesting in its portioning out of agency. She pushes, he resists, which flips the usual dynamic of jousting knights and shrinking maidens.
It wastes no time getting going. A meet-cute in a library where a young woman, Sakura, accidentally drops a book and gallant swain Haruki picks it up to return it to her. The book – her journal – falls open on the first page. Living with Dying, Sakura has titled it. It details her struggle with terminal pancreatic cancer.
Haruki now knows something Sakura has been at pains (literally) to conceal from her fellow classmates. She didn’t want anyone to know she’s ill. She has no interest in sympathy or being treated differently from the others. She wants to go out in the same glorious way that she’s lived her life, in an impetuous, giddy blaze.
Potential disaster then? It would be if Haruki weren’t such a morose, timid and withdrawn young man. So withdrawn that he’s disconnected from normal human emotion. He’s totally unfazed by the revelation that some young woman he doesn’t know is dying. She, realising that while he may be a loner, his weirdness is useful to her – he won’t blab – decides instantly to lock on to him.
Though, god knows, he tries to shake her off, which only encourages her to redouble her efforts. The dying don’t do risk assessment quite the same way as the living, and so she pushes him into ever greater levels of intimacy, working her way through a bucket list – starting with a slice of cake and culminating in a room in an out-of-town hotel where she hopes he’ll come across with the goods.
Meanwhile, their sudden new relationship is puzzling everyone around them. Male class hottie Takahiro, is seething away on the sidelines – there’s clearly history there – and Sakura’s snotty best friend Kyôko is wondering what Sakura is doing with this loser.
Haruki means spring in Japanese and Sakura means cherry blossom, so there’s poetic destiny at work. On a visual level, the animation is cute and bright. Director Shin’ichirô Ushijima seems determined to keep it light. Warm colours and pastel shades abound. The images get almost ethereal, especially when things get mournful. Lying on a score that’s soft and gentle, there’s more than a touch of the ASMR experience as the film swells to its downbeat climax.
I tried it with both the Japanese original voice cast and the English analogue. Both are pretty good but in the end I abandoned Erika Harlacher and Robbie’s Daymond’s dulcet tones and went back to source – Lynn and Mahiro Takasugi seem a touch more committed.
This is a film that’s unafraid to be strange. At one point the two youngsters share a plate of offal together in a restaurant and while ordering extra tripe and more heart she makes weird jokes about the state of her own organs – hence the title.
If you like it, and it is a very likeable and unusual film with a very strange way of managing the problem with all of these things – how to do the death – there is a live-action version too (with the slightly different title Let Me Eat Your Pancreas), which also follows Yoru Sumino’s 2015 novel, plus a web novel and a manga adaptation. So you can have second, third or even fourth helpings… of Pancreas.
I Want to Eat Your Pancreas – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
