News
London Screening of Hana & Alice in February
posted on by Andrew Osmond
Shunji Iwai's feature film Hana to Alice Satsujin Jiken (The Case of Hana & Alice) will have a screening on February 27 at Regent Street Cinema near Oxford Circus (map). The screening will be at 3 p.m., with a 14-minute Arabic animation being shown before the main film. Tickets can be booked here. The screening is part of the Asia House Film Festival.
Directed by Shunji Iwai, The Case of Hana and Alice is an animated prequel to his live-action 2004 coming-of-age film Hana & Alice. The original film showed the friendship between two high school girls; the anime film explains how they first met.
The website summarises the story:
Newly arrived in small-town suburbia with her divorced mother, middle-school age transfer student Tetsuko Arisugawa (Arisu or ‘Alice’ for short) finds herself the victim of bullying by her classmates and seeks solace through dance. She soon learns of an urban myth about a mysteriously vanished former student called Yuda (Japanese for ‘Judas’) who was allegedly murdered by four of his classmates. Hana, a reclusive girl who lives in a house bedecked with flowers next door, seems to hold the key to the mystery, and together the pair soon embark on a wild and unpredictable series of suburban escapades.
The first film was the breakthrough performance of the two lead actresses, Yū Aoi (live-action Rurouni Kenshin films, Tekkonkinkreet, Redline) and Anne Suzuki (Steamboy, Pokémon 4Ever, live-action Initial D). They both reprise their roles as Alice and Hana respectively as voice actresses in the anime film.
Iwai also directed the live-action films All About Lily Chou-Chou and Swallowtail Butterfly, and took a lead role in Hideaki Anno's 2003 live-action Shiki-Jitsu (Ritual)
Iwai directed The Case of Hana & Alice, wrote the screenplay and composed the soundtrack. The Japanese-language trailer is below.
Via Anime UK News.
