“2046”, Original Japanese First‑Release Advance Movie Poster 2004, Ultra‑Rare and Highly Sought‑After, B1 Size (72.8 × 103 cm) – Excellent+ / Close to Near Mint, Never Displayed GA26
This is an original Japanese B1 advance theatrical poster printed for the first Japanese release of Wong Kar‑wai’s 2046, starring Tony Leung Chiu‑wai, Takuya Kimura, Gong Li, Faye Wong, Zhang Ziyi, Carina Lau and Chang Chen, with a special appearance by Maggie Cheung.
The poster announces 「2004年 秋」—“Autumn 2004” rather than a fixed opening date and prominently identifies the film as an official selection in the Competition section of that year’s Cannes Film Festival. It therefore belongs to the advance phase of the original Japanese theatrical campaign, issued before the film opened in Japan on 23 October 2004.
2046 was selected for the main Competition at the 57th Cannes Film Festival. It subsequently received six Hong Kong Film Awards, including Best Actor for Tony Leung, Best Actress for Zhang Ziyi, Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, Best Costume and Make-Up Design, and Best Original Film Score. It was also named Best Foreign Language Film by the New York Film Critics Circle.
This poster is preserved in exceptional Excellent+ / close to Near Mint condition. It is unused, never displayed and completely unfolded. It is also the first original B1 example of this extraordinary Japanese advance design that we have handled.
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Design
This is one of the most visually arresting Japanese poster designs created for a Wong Kar‑wai film. Rather than presenting a conventional montage of its celebrated ensemble cast, the composition concentrates upon the movie’s speculative-fiction narrative and its most memorable futuristic setting.
Faye Wong appears as the android counterpart of Wang Jing‑wen, stretched diagonally through the curved interior of the train travelling toward the enigmatic destination known as 2046. She reaches toward an elongated fluorescent light while the compartment’s sweeping panels, vents and concentric mechanical ribs curve around her.
The radically distorted perspective makes the train appear simultaneously like a capsule, tunnel and dream chamber. Its tilted visual axis removes any stable sense of floor, ceiling or gravity, making Faye Wong seem almost suspended within the architecture. The effect perfectly suits a film in which recollection, fantasy, fiction and lived experience continually pass into one another.
At the centre appears the Japanese advance tagline:
「その不思議な未来では
ミステリートレインが動き出し
アンドロイドが恋におちる。」
“In that mysterious future, a mystery train begins to move, and an android falls in love.”
The line refers to the film’s story-within-a-story, in which Takuya Kimura’s character travels aboard an apparently endless train toward 2046 and falls in love with an android attendant played by Faye Wong. Wong Kar‑wai transforms the futuristic journey into another variation upon his defining subjects: emotional delay, unreturned love and people waiting for responses that may never arrive.
The image is dominated by a highly unusual acidic yellow-green, antique gold, ivory and black palette. The glowing interior moves from almost white illumination at its centre to progressively darker olive and brown tones around the lower mechanical structure. Small touches of red and pink within Faye Wong’s costume and the control-panel details punctuate the otherwise restricted colour scheme.
Across the lower third, the enormous title “2046” has been rendered in irregular white, brush-like numerals. Their roughly painted appearance provides a powerful contrast to the clean Japanese cast lettering and the sleek geometry of the train. The numerals look immediate and handmade, almost as though they have been painted directly across the futuristic image.
At the left, the principal cast is presented in a disciplined vertical column:
Tony Leung
Takuya Kimura
Gong Li
Faye Wong
Zhang Ziyi
Carina Lau
Chang Chen
Maggie Cheung is separately credited for a special appearance. Takuya Kimura’s prominent second billing, immediately beneath Tony Leung, reflects his importance to the Japanese campaign and to the film’s futuristic romantic strand.
The lower border carries the Cannes laurel and the announcement:
「本年度カンヌ国際映画祭・コンペティション部門 出品作品」
“Official Selection, Cannes International Film Festival Competition.”
This is followed by 「2004年 秋」—“Autumn 2004”, confirming the poster’s status as an original pre-release or advance design rather than the later dated theatrical poster.
A narrow filmstrip of richly coloured character images runs along the extreme lower edge. These small portraits introduce the film’s ensemble cast and its parallel romantic narratives without compromising the extraordinary simplicity of the principal composition. The strip also forms a warm red and orange counterweight to the cool yellow-green expanse above it.
The campaign image retains a conspicuous cinematic grain and dense printed screening, especially across Faye Wong’s costume, the shadowed train ribs and the yellow-green walls. This granular quality is inherent to the enlarged source image and original printing process. It is an intentional part of the poster’s atmosphere and should not be mistaken for fading, foxing or surface deterioration.
The design is printed on substantial, smooth, white-backed theatrical stock, considerably more robust than the lightweight paper used for Japanese chirashi handbills. The dense lithographic printing gives the pale highlights a luminous quality while preserving remarkably deep blacks through the lower section. The unprinted reverse remains clean and confirms that this is a single-sided theatrical sheet.
The Japanese advance artwork has become particularly desirable because it distils the film’s retro-futuristic narrative into a singular graphic image. It is very different from the more familiar international character and montage designs and from the entirely new artwork created for the later 4K restoration campaign.
Original material for Wong Kar‑wai’s films is now collected across several overlapping fields: Hong Kong cinema, Japanese film advertising, contemporary graphic design, fashion imagery and international auteur cinema. This design has additional crossover appeal through the presence of Faye Wong and the prominent Japanese billing of Takuya Kimura.
Rare B1 format: This is the large Japanese B1 theatrical format, measuring approximately 72.8 × 103 cm / 28.7 × 40.6 in. A B1 has twice the surface area of the standard Japanese B2 poster and was intended for prominent cinema-lobby, foyer and major promotional display.
The standard B2 was the principal Japanese theatrical poster size and was distributed much more broadly. Larger B1 sheets were produced and used in considerably smaller numbers, while their greater surface area made them more vulnerable to folding, edge damage and display wear.
Original B2 examples of this 2046 design are already difficult to obtain in outstanding condition. An unused, unfolded B1 survivor—at twice the area of the B2 and retaining its full original dimensions—is exceptionally scarce. B1 examples appear substantially less frequently than Japanese B2 posters.
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Cult status / film notes
2046 is one of Wong Kar‑wai’s most ambitious and formally complex films: at once a period romance, a work of speculative fiction and an extended meditation on memory, repetition and emotional loss.
The film continues the story of Chow Mo‑wan, played by Tony Leung, following his unconsummated relationship with Su Li‑zhen in In the Mood for Love. Returning to Hong Kong, Chow has become a writer and emotionally detached womaniser, attempting to conceal the lasting effect of the relationship he was unable to fulfil.
While living in a hotel, he begins writing a futuristic novel entitled 2046. In this imagined world, travellers board a mysterious train bound for a place where they believe their lost memories can be recovered and where, supposedly, nothing ever changes. The people Chow has encountered in life reappear within his fiction in transformed forms, including Faye Wong as an android and Takuya Kimura as the traveller who falls in love with her.
The number 2046 operates throughout the film as a room number, a destination, a year and an emotional space in which Chow attempts to preserve what has already disappeared. The science-fiction sequences are not conventional predictions of the future; they are visual manifestations of a man unable to stop rewriting his past.
In this respect, the film forms a loose continuation of both Days of Being Wild and In the Mood for Love. Familiar characters, names, gestures and settings return, altered by time and memory. Wong’s fragmented chronology mirrors Chow’s emotional condition: the past is never entirely past, while the future is continually populated by people he has already lost.
The film brought together an exceptional Pan-Asian ensemble. Tony Leung is joined by Gong Li, Faye Wong, Zhang Ziyi, Carina Lau, Chang Chen and Maggie Cheung, while Takuya Kimura’s participation gave the production particular cultural significance in Japan. The Japanese poster reflects this by placing Kimura directly beneath Leung in the principal cast billing.
The visual world was created through the combined cinematography of Christopher Doyle, Kwan Pun‑leung and Lai Yiu‑fai, with William Chang Suk‑ping responsible for editing and, with Alfred Yau, the film’s extraordinary production design. Chang also created the costume and make-up design. The score combines music by Peer Raben and Shigeru Umebayashi with Wong’s characteristically evocative use of existing recordings.
Mirrors, curved corridors, saturated colour, slow motion and partially obscured bodies turn the film’s rooms and train compartments into psychological spaces. The futuristic sequences extend the same aesthetic language into science fiction: technology is not presented as clean or clinical but as worn, sensual and melancholic.
Following its Cannes Competition premiere, the film’s major Hong Kong Film Award victories recognised not only its performances but also the cinematography, art direction, costumes and music that created its extraordinary visual and emotional texture.
Its stature has continued to grow. The film has been described as a culminating work in Wong Kar‑wai’s cinema—a synthesis of the romantic longing, temporal dislocation and lyrical melancholy found throughout his earlier films. It placed highly in contemporary year-end polls and was subsequently ranked among the leading films of its decade.
A director-supervised restoration later returned 2046 to Japanese cinemas as part of the WKW4K retrospective, introducing the film to a new theatrical audience almost eighteen years after its original Japanese release. That revival used newly created campaign artwork, making the present poster specifically identifiable with the original 2004 first-release period.
The continuing international admiration for Wong Kar‑wai, together with the film’s exceptional cast and highly developed visual identity, has made original first-release Japanese material increasingly sought after. Within that material, this futuristic Faye Wong design—and especially the monumental B1 format—stands among the most distinctive and difficult examples to secure.
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Condition
Excellent+ / close to Near Mint. Unused and never displayed.
The poster remains completely unfolded, with no horizontal or vertical fold lines and no sharp creases crossing the image. This is particularly important on a B1 sheet of this scale, as substantial theatrical stock can permanently retain fold impressions once compressed.
The front retains exceptionally vivid and unfaded colour. The yellow-green and antique-gold tones remain intensely saturated, the illuminated cream areas are bright and clean, the blacks are dense, and the monumental white “2046” title remains crisp and strongly contrasted.
The edges and corners present exceptionally well, with the sheet retaining its full B1 proportions. Any evidence of handling is negligible and consistent with careful rolled storage rather than theatrical exhibition.
The reverse is remarkably clean and evenly toned.
The circular objects visible along the top and bottom edges in the reverse photograph are temporary magnets used to hold the poster safely during photography. They have not pierced or otherwise altered the paper.
Finding the original Japanese B2 of this design in excellent unfolded condition is already difficult. To encounter the same design in the ultra-rare B1 format—unused, never displayed, completely unfolded and preserved close to Near Mint—is extraordinary.
Once professionally framed, the poster will have an exceptional architectural presence. The scale of the B1 format greatly intensifies the curved train interior, the elongated figure of Faye Wong and the immense hand-painted title.
Please review the photographs carefully. They show the exact original poster offered for sale.
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This poster is an original Japanese theatrical B1 advance poster from the 2004 first-release campaign.
It predates the film’s Japanese opening on 23 October 2004 and announces its release simply as “Autumn 2004.”
It is not a reproduction, reprint, later 4K restoration poster or commercial art print.
It is single-sided and measures approximately 72.8 × 103 cm / 28.7 × 40.6 in.
It is approximately 22 years old.
Certificate of Authenticity included.
