Professor Layton and the Eternal Diva

Professor Layton, an archaeologist with a taste for puzzles, and his young assistant Luke are drawn into a mystery when the singer Janice Quatlane asks for help. She reports that a friend who died a year earlier has reappeared as a small girl, claiming to have found eternal life. The trail leads the pair to a London opera house and to a performance built around the legend of Ambrosia, a kingdom of everlasting life. There the audience is forced into a dangerous game of riddles whose winner is promised immortality.

The film is an animated mystery from Japan, released in 2009 and running 99 minutes. It was directed by Masakazu Hashimoto, the first of several features he made; his later work consists of films in the Crayon Shin-chan series. Aya Matsui wrote the screenplay, and the voice cast includes Yo Oizumi as Layton, Maki Horikita as Luke, Saki Aibu as Emmy Altava, Nana Mizuki as Janice Quatlane, Atsuro Watabe as Jean Descole and Hochu Otsuka as Inspector Clamp Grosky. It is based on the Professor Layton games and is set within that world.

Audience responses differ by platform: on IMDb it holds 6.7/10 from around 1,700 votes, while on TMDB it stands at 7.4/10 from about 151 votes, a smaller and warmer sample. Both point to a modest but real following for the film.