Netflix has released an official trailer for the upcoming live-action City Hunter movie, which will begin streaming worldwide on April 25.
The new video reveals the presence of the Angel Dust drug in the plot, and delivers an extended preview of TM NETWORK's “Get Wild Continual,” after last month's teaser trailer teased only the opening notes to the theme song. There's also plenty of new action and comedy footage to behold.
City Hunter | Official Trailer | Netflix City Hunter is inspired by the Shueisha-published manga by Tsukasa Houjou, which ran from 1985 to 1991. Previous live-action adaptations include a 1993 movie starring Jackie Chan, a 2019 French adaptation, and an unreleased Chinese adaptation. This new take is set in modern-day Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Netflix's synopsis describes the film as:
After receiving the message “XYZ, please find my sister,” Ryo and his partner Hideyuki go on to search for Kurumi, a famous cosplayer. Meanwhile, mysterious violent incidents are taking place in Shinjuku, and Saeko, a skilled police detective is having a tough time solving these cases. Ryo and Hideyuki work in tandem to pursue Kurumi, but tragedy strikes when Hideyuki is killed during the investigation. Witnessing her brother's death, Kaori implores Ryo to uncover the truth behind the incident.
The City Hunter manga has inspired various anime, including a multi-season TV series that premiered in 1987, TV specials, and movies. A new anime movie was released in 2023. Two City Hunter spin-off manga from other artists began in 2017 and 2018.
The Mangahot website publishes the manga in English and describes the premise as:
Ryo Saeba, aka City Hunter. A sweeper who fulfills all his client's needs. He'll do anything from bodyguarding to contract killing, but he'll only take the job if a pretty woman is involved, or the client's sincerity makes his heart tremble . Together with his partner Kaori Makimura, the kid sister of his late best friend, Ryo fights the evil haunting the shadows of the city!!
Staff
• Director: Yuichi Sato (Na mo Naki Sekai no End Roll) • scriptwriter: Tatsuro Mishima (Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead live-action)
Cast
• Ryohei Suzuki as Ryo Saeba • Misato Morita as Kaori Makimura • Masanobu Ando as Hideyuki Makimura • Fumino Kimura as Saeko Nogami
An anime adaptation of the R18 novel I Am The Only One Who Is Not Attacked In The World Filled With Zombies (Zombie no Afureta Sekai de Ore dake Osowarenai) has been announced. It will be broadcast in Japan on the AT-X channel.
(For context, AT-X's offerings include spicy content like Gushing Over Magical Girl's less-censored “Akogare” version and the uncensored version of Interspecies Reviewers.)
I Am The Only One Who Is Not Attacked In The World Filled With Zombies is written by Rokuro Uraji, who first started posting the story on the R18 fiction website Nocturne Novels in 2013. The physical novels, which are illustrated by Saburou and published under Frontier Works' Nox Novels label, started in 2016 and have three volumes as of March 2017.
The story has also inspired a manga adaptation by Chihiro Masuda, which releases its third tankoubon volume on February 5, and a number of Seacoxx-developed visual novels, with the latter having the title of I Walk Among Zombies in English. Steam describes I Walk Among Zombies Vol. 1, which was first released in Japan digitally in 2015, as:
Yuusuke is an office worker with a dislike for people, preferring to do his job alone and in silence. When the company he works for suddenly goes bankrupt, he loses his job, and with that, all his motivation disappears, and he becomes a complete shut-in.
On one of the rare days he decides to leave his apartment, after a week-long video game binge, a mysterious man attacks him and bites his arm. Though Yuusuke manages to escape back to his room, he comes down with a fever and becomes bedridden for several days.
When Yuusuke wakes up, recovered, he goes to resume his normal life, but he soon finds that in the short time he was asleep the world has completely changed. Zombies have emerged in every corner of the world simultaneously, and the few human survivors are now in hiding.
However…
“Why am I the only one the zombies don't attack?”
How will Yuusuke take advantage of his new situation, and what will he discover?
The Ghost in the Shell anime website recently published an interview with Kazuchika Kise, the chief director and character designer of Ghost in the Shell: Arise and Ghost in the Shell: The New Movie. One of the questions posed to Kise, an anime veteran who has character design credits on shows like Blue Seed, xxxHOLIC, Blood-C, Made in Abyss, and the Fate/Grand Order Camelot films, was if he had an eye on any current trends. This led to Kise wondering about the profusion of isekai anime.
“I think there are too many stories already asking, 'Do we all really hate the modern world so much?' I find it strange that all that gets made is isekai stories,” was Kise's response. “There was even a series about being reborn as a vending machine recently. That one really stunned me. I feel like there are fewer grounded anime works than there used to be.”
Kise also had trouble buying into the RPG-like elements that are common in the modern isekai genre. “Recent anime works will show things like a level-up gauge that appears when characters tap the air, even though there's no in-setting reason for them to have a personal interface like that. I may just be getting old, but it really makes me wonder: 'What is going on here?' It just doesn't work for me.”
The isekai topic was just a small part of the lengthy interview. Most of it is, naturally, about the Ghost in the Shell series. Kise was an animation director, layout artist, and key animator on the classic Ghost in the Shell movie, and he joked about the difficulties of working with its character designer Hiroyuki Okiura due to the latter's ability. “At the time, I had just finished production of Patlabor 2: The Movie and was looking for a next project, so I didn't have a way to dodge it. It looked like I would have to animate alongside Hiroyuki Okiura if I joined up on [Mamoru] Oshii's project, too, which I was sick of doing. *laughs* It's hard to match his characters and key frames, which doesn’t leave room to enjoy the job. So unsurprisingly, I had my hands full trying to polish my art to Okiura’s level over the time we produced Ghost in the Shell.”
Okiura had other roles beyond character designer, and one of the scenes he partook in as key animator left a strong impression on Kise. Shortly before the part of the interview where he shared the above, Kise was asked about scenes that he was “particularly invested in.” He replied, “If I had to pick, it might be the opening of the film Ghost in the Shell. The one where we see a cyborg assembled in a lab, eventually taking on Motoko's form. Our character designer, Hiroyuki Okiura , did most of that, and it still looks good and draws me in even now.”
As an animator, Kise “had more fun” drawing the guys of Section 9 than cyborg protagonist Motoko Kusanagi. “I started my career with an animation studio called Anime R, and our president was Moriyasu Taniguchi, a famous artist who specialized in middle- aged men. That naturally inspired me to want to draw old guys in a way that looked cool, too. That's why I liked Togusa out of the cast of Ghost in the Shell, since he's mostly human. His human emotions are easier to follow than Motoko’s, so I never get tired of drawing him. *laughs*”
Other Ghost in the Shell stories and tidbits include director Mamoru Oshii's fondness for low angles (“he often told us to lower the camera even more after layout checks”) and how the staff would play Virtua Fighter (“I also played against Oshii sometimes, but I could easily guard his attacks and throw him around since he always uses the same character and same special.”) Apparently, fighting games also has an influence on the film’s production. “He would also use fighting game commands on the Ghost in the Shell storyboards. Like, he'd say 'a move like a PPPK' to convey the action he wanted. And I'd reply, 'That doesn't clarify anything at all.' *laughs*”
On more current topics, Kise said that he doesn't “hate” CG anime, but it doesn't suit his tastes either (“Personally, I like stop-motion videos using things like action figures.”) He also feels that the action in recent shows are “too fast” and difficult to follow. “Attacks lack weight. It doesn't feel realistic. Since no one dies from being hit in the first place, it also doesn't look painful. I feel like the intent behind the art is just more extravagant action than depicting a fight with opponents testing one another.”
Kise ended the interview by saying that he'd personally “like to see an entirely AI-made Ghost in the Shell someday, without human involvement” if Ghost in the Shell creator Shirow Masamune would allow it. “What would it end up as if you used AI for the script, the character designs, the editing, and everything else? I'd be very curious about that, and I feel like Ghost in the Shell is well suited to that kind of experiment as a series.”
ムラゴン ホーム
