69-year-old set to play key role in Hollywood anime adaptation.
Live action (Page 9)
The premiere of the Kuroko’s Basketball stage play is still a few months away, but the producers are giving fans of sports anime and/or dreamy boys a sneak peek with the first in-costume cast photo.
Next month, Hetalia, the anime and manga franchise featuring anthropomorphized nations and a hefty amount of homoerotic subtext, is getting its very own live-action musical adaptation, and the play’s producers have just released the first photos of the cast in costume as their respective nations.
Every couple of years, rumors surfaces of some slim chance that a live-action Legend of Zelda film is about to get the green light from rights holder Nintendo. Then, as suddenly as the speculation began, it fizzles out, leaving fans feeling dejected about the lack of a big screen quest for Link and Zelda.
Really, though, The Legend of Zelda’s storyline and overall visual look vary so much from one video game installment to the next that a film adaptation would probably fail to please gamers whose favorite chapter wasn’t used as the specific source material. On the other hand, Metroid, Nintendo’s dark space adventure, has the foundation for an awesome, crowd-pleasing movie, as this fan-made live-action short film shows.
We recently took a look at the first photos of the upcoming Rurouni Kenshin stage musical cast in costume, and looking at the comments for that article, more than a few fans of the hit anime and manga franchise are wishing they see the show in person. But if a trip to the Takarazuka theater in Tokyo or Hyogo Prefecture doesn’t fit into your schedule, there’s still a way to get a taste of the all-female performing troupe’s live-action spectacle, as the theatre company has released a preview video of the cast showing off their fighting moves and crossing swords!
Adapting anime to live-action is an extremely difficult venture. It’s not impossible, though, and one of the few icons of Japanese animation to make the transition smoothly is Himura Kenshin, hero of samurai saga Rurouni Kenshin.
The swordsman with the scarred face and soul has three successful live-action films under his belt, and this winter Japan’s all-female Takarazuka stage troupe will be raising the curtain on its own Rurouni Kenshin musical. Opening night is still a ways off, but the first photos of the cast in costume have been revealed, and gender-flipped or not, it’s hard to imagine a closer likeness for Kenshin himself than Takarazuka’s.
The recent boom in live-action movie, TV, and stage adaptations of hit anime has to be a headache for producers. Most anime start out as manga, where the only limits on outlandish character and costume design is the imagination of the original artist, and we imagine it’s an exhaustive search to find real-life actors and actresses who look the part.
But Japan’s casting directors are proving themselves up to the challenge. Hot on the heels of the recently revealed Prison School TV drama come photos of the cast of the stage adaptation of Ghost in the Shell, and not only are there some uncanny resemblances, we now know why there won’t be a DVD or live streaming of the performance.
Battle Angel: Alita, known as GUNM in Japan, is one of anime and manga’s highlights of the ’90s. The original manga, created by Yukito Kishiro, ran for about five years from 1990 to 1995 with a newer series running from 2000 to 2014, in addition to two OVAs produced in the ’90s. The post-apocalyptic setting and cyborg main character have ensured the property’s popularity for decades, both domestically and abroad.
It’s been long known that James Cameron is a fan of the series and has been trying to produce a Hollywood film version for around 15 years — but things are finally starting to take shape. Today, news broke that a new director is in negotiations to take on the project.
San Diego Comic Con is famous for getting all the big announcements and sneak peaks about new projects, but New York Comic Con is getting large enough that major news stories are being broken at the East Coast convention. Some of the biggest news over the weekend for anime fans was the announcement of a live-action Hollywood film adaptation of Tiger & Bunny. With such a mammoth announcement, it didn’t take much time for someone to come along and fan-cast the entire series. Judging by looks alone, we are pretty impressed with their choices and while we probably won’t see so many amazing actors come together for one movie, it’s always nice to dream.
With part one of the live-action movie adaptation released for the first time outside Japan on Wednesday this week, fans of the hugely successful manga and anime series Attack on Titan were no doubt incredibly excited to see their favourite giant-slaying characters brought to life by living, breathing Japanese actors.
Little did then know, however, that when one of the English subtitles added to the movie for its North American release would appear on-screen, it would remain there—for a full 20 minutes—while the action continued behind it.
As you probably know, Attack on Titan, the mega-popular manga and anime series, was recently adapted into a live-action movie and infamously received absolutely horrible reviews—it might be a toss-up between this movie and Fantastic 4 as to which summer blockbuster was worse. For its part, the Attack on Titan movie was so horrible that one Japanese critic hoped for the titans to eat the characters and be done with the whole thing. No one is asking Dr. Doom to eat Mr. Fantastic…yet.
As they say though, you shouldn’t judge something till you see it for yourself, so we had to send one of our own.
As tricky as the process of adapting a hit anime to live-action can be, in the case of the most popular series, it’s not hard to see why someone would want to try. Even if you can’t please everyone when making the transitions, in the case of something like Attack on Titan, having a huge, solidly cemented fanbase that’s hungry for more content is incredibly attractive to producers.
But not every anime-to-live-action project is based on such an established hit. While creator Akira Hiramoto’s Prison School manga was first published in 2011, its TV anime hasn’t even been on the air for two months yet. Nevertheless, there’s already a live-action television drama in the works, and the first pictures of the cast, in costume, have just been released.
Actress Scarlett Johansson gave an update on Dreamworks‘ live-action Ghost in the Shell film during the press event for next month’s Avengers: Age of Ultron.
There has been a successful anime, a trio of movies, various games and even a musical, but one form of media the Death Note series has been noticeably missing is a TV drama.
But just like an entry into the infamous Death Note itself, a one-line news report revealed that a live-action drama was finally in the works. And we’ll be seeing it a lot sooner than you think!
The official website for the two Attack on Titan live-action films unveiled a new poster for the movies on Friday. Theaters in Japan will begin displaying the poster on April 25.
The first movie will open on August 8, and the second movie will open on September 19.
Since Mario and his younger, taller, skinnier brother, Luigi, first joined us in the mid 80s, there have been scores of games, merchandise, an awkward but awesome TV show (The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!) and a truly terrible live-action movie, amongst other things. They are, quite possibly, the most famous brothers in the world, so it’s no surprise that a number of fan-made videos featuring the world of Super Mario have been made. One such creative parody has transported Mario and his friends and enemies from Smash Bros. into a war-torn world that obviously only a pair of plumbers can save. Hold on to your mustaches people…the complete series of “Mario Warfare” has been uploaded to YouTube.
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