Bandai Visual USA has announced that they will be releasing the anime series, sola, on DVD beginning on June 10, 2008. Last year, in a poll taken by Spider Networks, the series was voted ‘Best Anime of 2007’ in Japan, so North American viewers are clearly in for quite a treat.

The word "sola" is akin both to the Japanese word for "sky" and the Italian/Spanish word for "alone." Original series creator Naoki Hisaya concentrated primarily on the "sky" meaning in conceiving the theme of the work. "It exists above all of us without being noticed, and it only changes its form for those who look up. I wanted to create a story that changes in different ways, just like the sky."

The story itself revolves around a high school student named Yorito Morimiya, who loves to take photos of the sky. While attempting to capture night turning into day, he meets Matsuri Shihou, who is a "Yaka" (the Calamity of the Night), who has lived hundreds of years in the darkness of night, and yearns to see the blue sky herself. During the course of the story, she must face the many past tragedies of her life.

Bandai likens this show to those that feature fascinating characters against an appealing visual backdrop, in the tradition of other "night people" series like Witch Hunter Robin or Vampire Princess Miyu. Nayoki Hisaya wrote the original story, with character creation by Naru Nanao, while the series was directed by Tomoki Kobayashi (who also recently directed Utawarerumono).

Actually, sola isn’t just an anime series – it’s more of a multi-dimensional work of art that’s been going on since late 2006. The manga prologue was first published on December 21st of 2006, in the Japanese magazine "Dengeki Daioh," with a short drama CD that served as another prologue to the series being released ten days later in Tokyo at Comiket, the world’s largest comic convention.

As the manga serialization (illustrated by Chako Abeno) continued through 2007, the thirteen-episode anime series ran through the spring in Japan, with the DVDs being released there from June through August, and another longer drama CD also appearing in August. Meanwhile, the serial in the magazine finally ended just last Thursday.

Now Bandai will begin releasing the DVDs in North America, each of the five containing three episodes, but even that adds another dimension to the project, since each of the last two DVDs will contain an extra episode that never ran in the televised series. And to further sweeten the DVD experience, those who purchase theirs from dot-anime.us will receive an as-yet-to-be-determined exclusive gift.

The final stage (or is it?) in this ongoing multi-media project will be when Broccoli Books releases the sola graphic novel.

The saga of the series itself is a fascinating interweaving of media over time. But combine that with the visually beautiful and complex story portrayed in both the DVD and manga, and sola becomes something of an all-encompassing experience.