With 8 months to promote Takashi Miike‘s live-action adaptation of the popular 1970s cartoon Yatterman it makes sense that the film’s PR team is keeping things close to the vest so far. But earlier this morning NTV viewers got a *very* brief sneak peek at a scene from the film. It’s tough to make anything out in the scene shown but given what we know about the cast so far it’s safe to assume that’s Arashi‘s Sho Sakurai as Yatter-Bark’s builder Gan-chan looking up at his creation with teen idol Saki Fukuda in the background in her role as Gan’s partner Ai-chan and a CGI-created Omotchama buzzing around the laboratory. Live-action shooting wrapped last month and everything seems to be on schedule for a March 2009 release. Clip after the break.

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With the recent release of The Machine Girl and the name Noboru Iguchi being thrown around on mainstream sites like Cinematical, I think it’s a good time to write about one of his projects that didn’t get nearly enough attention when it should have. Based on a Daijiro Morohoshi manga, Shiori to Shimiko no Kaiki Jikenbo (roughly “The bizarre case files of Shiori and Shimiko") is a horror/comedy series which aired Saturday nights at 12:50 AM - 1:20 AM on NTV from January 5, 2008 - March 29, 2008. During its 13-episode run I watched it religiously via torrents (sorry, don’t sue me) and it was always the undisputed highlight of my week.

The show stars Atsuko Maeda of the 48-member Jpop group AKB48 as Shimiko and current Victor Koshien poster girl Nao Minamisawa as Shiori. Shimiko is a quiet, shy girl who moves to a new town to live with an uncle. One of the first people she meets is Shiori, a tomboyish, self-confident girl who never seems to be phased by any dangerous or strange situation she gets herself into. The show was fairly formulaic; normally something odd or supernatural would happen in the town and Shiori would gather her group of friends for a meeting about it in the school bathroom. Then Shiori and Shimiko would venture out to investigate the situation and interview people. Something would usually place Shimiko in mortal danger until Shiori popped back in at the last minute to solve the entire mystery, giving an enthusiastic speech and finishing off with her customary thumb + index finger point of success. There were obviously many exceptions to the formula, but that’s the basic idea.

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TV Tokyo has a 51-episode drama entitled Keitai Sousakan 7 (Cellphone Investigation 7) in the works, with Takashi Miike serving as supervising director. Some of the other directors involved in the project are Mamoru Oshii (Ghost in the Shell), Shusuke Kaneko (Death Note), and Manabu Aso (One Missed Call: Final). The main protagonist of the show, Kieta (Masataka Kubota), is a high school freshman who is enlisted to join an organization called “Anchor” in order to bring down an internet crime syndicate. He’s given a little robot named “Phonebraver 7” to assist him which is capable of transforming into a cellphone. Apparently it’s also capable of becoming a marketing gimmick to sell creepy little SoftBank cellphones with arms and legs at some point in the future, as one would expect.

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I posted this commercial yesterday thinking it was just an advertisement for Takashi Miike‘s Zatoichi stage play starring Show Aikawa. But it turns out it’s actually going to be broadcast in high definition on WOWOW on February 16, 2008 at 2pm. Please for the love of everything holy, someone video capture this. Not that I condone that sort of thing. As long as I’m editing the post anyway here’s a higher bitrate version of the same commercial…

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