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Live-Action Lychee Light Club Film's Trailer Previews Tomokazu Sugita as Lychee

The official website for the live-action film adaptation of Usamaru Furuya's Lychee Light Club manga began streaming the film's full theatrical trailer on Friday. The trailer previews the film's main cast, and reveals that Tomokazu Sugita (Gintama's Gintoki, Assassination Classroom's Tadaomi Karasuma) will voice the Lychee robot character in the film. Sugita also narrates the trailer.

The film stars:

(Top Row, From Left)

• Ayami Nakajō (Summer Nude) as the heroine, Kanon
• Shūhei Nomura (Taifū no Noruda, live-action Chihayafuru) as the club founder and leader Tamiya
• Yūki Furukawa (live-action Itazura na Kiss, High School Debut) as the dictatorial Zera
• Shōtarō Mamiya (live-action Yamada-kun to 7-nin no Majo) as Jaibo, the striking youth who is loyal to Zera and takes somewhat cruel and insane actions

(Bottom Row, From Left)

• Kisetsu Fujiwara as Kaneda
• Reiya Masaki (live-action All Esper Dayo!, Yarukkya Knight) as Dafu
• Ryō Matsuda (Kamen Rider Gaim) as Raizō
• Junya Ikeda (Digimon Adventure tri. Saikai, Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger) as Niko
• Junki Tozuka (Kamen Rider Wizard) as Dentaku
• Amane Okayama (live-action Another, Gasso) as Yakobu

The film will open on February 13 at Shinjuku Wald 9 in Tokyo and other theaters in Japan. The film already premiered at the 20th Busan International Film Festival, which ran from October 1-10 in South Korea.

Nikkatsu began streaming an English-subtitled version of the film's second teaser trailer in October.

Nikkatsu describes the film as follows:

The year is 2XXX and Keiko Town is an over-industrialized stretch of blackened factories pumping out thick layers of smoke that cast it in a perpetual state of semi-darkness. The citizens of Keiko Town fare no better and walk around their dilapidated town in a stupor of hopeless despair. In an abandoned factory in an obscure corner of town lies the secret base of Hikari Club.
The teenage boys of Hikari Club despise the adults of their community and have taken it upon themselves to eradicate what they perceive to be the evil and filth of the grown-up world. To accomplish this, they build a machine with artificial intelligence and dub it “Litchi”. However, with the boys on the cusp of puberty and turning into adults themselves, their own world has begun to collapse around them.

The manga is itself an adaptation of an earlier stage play by Norimizu Ameya's theatrical troupe Tokyo Grand Guignol. The story revolves around nine students at an all-boys school who create a god-like Lychee machine to capture the beautiful women of the world. However, the machine eventually becomes self-aware "and is soon equally capable of measuring beauty and executing justice."

Eisuke Naitō is directing the film and collaborating with Keisuke Tominaga on the script. The film will have an original story, but original manga creator Furuya stated, "I think the contents will not betray fans of the original work." The film will incorporate story elements from Tamiya's point of view from the Bokura no Hikari Club (Our Light Club) prequel manga.

Usamaru Furuya's one-volume Lychee Light Club manga ran in Manga Erotics F from 2005 to 2006. North American publisher Vertical released the manga in April 2011. Furuya also drew the Bokura no Hikari Club (Our Light Club) prequel manga, which ended in 2012. The manga was published online for free in Ohta Publishing's PocoPoco web manga magazine.

The manga also inspired a new stage play in 2012, and the play's cast voiced a television anime as well. Crunchyroll streamed the television anime into several countries as it aired in Japan.

Source: Comic Natalie