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Mamoru Oshii's Musashi Samurai Film Teaser Streamed
posted on by Egan Loo
The official Japanese website for Miyamoto Musashi: Sōken ni Haseru Yume (Musashi: The Dream of the Last Samurai), the Production I.G samurai anime film scheduled for early next summer, has launched with a teaser trailer on Friday. Award-winning anime creator and director Mamoru Oshii (Patlabor, Ghost in the Shell, The Sky Crawlers) is developing and writing the film. The website says that the film will deal with "the fact and fiction about the Niten Ichi-ryū of Musashi Miyamoto, the seeker of the way of the invincible sword." Miyamoto is a legendary swordsmen who pioneered the Hyōhō Niten Ichi-ryū style of two-sword fighting and wrote The Book of Five Rings, a book that has been compared to Sun Tzu's The Art of War for its insight on tactics and strategy.
Mizuho Nishikubo, an animation director for Oshii's Ghost in the Shell films, Patlabor 2: The Movie, The Sky Crawlers, and the anime sequence in Kill Bill: Volume 1, is in charge of the actual direction of the film. Oshii had similarly created the Blood: The Last Vampire and Jin-Roh - The Wolf Brigade films for others — Hiroyuki Kitakubo and Hiroyuki Okiura, respectively — to actually direct. Samurai Champloo and Kill Bill: Volume 1 animation director Kazuto Nakazawa, will design the characters, while Kazuchika Kise (Blood+, Evangelion: 1.0 You Are (Not) Alone, Ghost in the Shell films) will supervise the animation process. The media company Pony Canyon is planning to offer pre-sale tickets at the Comic Market 75 event in Tokyo from December 28 to December 30.
The historical Miyamoto figure has directly or indirectly inspired several earlier manga and anime stories. Those stories include Toei Animation's Wanpaku Nitouryou - Shounen Miyamoto Musashi television special (1982), Gōshō Aoyama's Yaiba manga and television series (1988-1993), Phoenix Animation's Ninja Resurrection video (1988), Studio Comet's Shura no Toki television series (2004), and Monkey Punch's Musashi television series (2006). Perhaps the most popular manga based on Miyamoto is Takehiko Inoue's ongoing epic samurai series, Vagabond.
Source: animeanime.jp
Image © 2009 Production I.G/Miyamoto Musashi Production Committee
