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New High School! Kimengumi Anime Casts 'Udegumi' Athletes
posted on by Joanna Cayanan
The official website for the new television anime of Motoei Shinzawa's High School! Kimengumi (High School! Funny-Face Club) manga revealed on Tuesday the "leader visual" and cast for the "Udegumi" (literally "Arm Gang"), a clique of all-around sports athletes. Yūsuke Kobayashi will voice "Udegumi" leader Kai Undō:
The cast for other members of Udegumi include (image above from second top left to bottom right):
- Takuto Yokoyama as Ken Akiresu
- Masayuki Satō as Susumu Intahai
- Shuya Watanabe as Yutaka Konjō
- Ayumu Asakura as Chikara Suji
Like many of the characters, the Udegumi members' names are word plays, specifically of words linked to physical education and athletes. For example, Kai Undō and Ken Akiresu's names in Japanese are homonyms for "athletic meet" and "Achilles' heel."
The gag comedy centers on a group of five idiosyncratic, wacky students, known in the school halls as Kimengumi, who all befriend the cutest girl in school and her best friend. Whereas the original manga (and its first television anime) were set in the 1980s, this new anime will set the story in the modern Reiwa era with a new cast.
The new anime stars:
- Tomokazu Seki as Rei Ichidō
- Shunsuke Takeuchi as Gō Reietsu
- Yoshitsugu Matsuoka as Kiyoshi Shusse
- Chiaki Kobayashi as Jin Daima
- Kikunosuke Toya as Dai Monohoshi
- Haruka Shiraishi as Yui Kawa
- Ikumi Hasegawa as Chie Uru
- Nobuhiko Okamoto as Yō Nihiruda
- Toshiki Horikita as Omiya Nakasudō
- Yūhi Asagiri as Kensaku Meri
- Masafumi Kobatake as Ranto Jōgai
- Kazuki Ogawa as Koeru Tabuchi
Kazuaki Seki (live-action Blank Canvas: My So-Called Artist’s Journey, Faking Beethoven, music videos for Perfume and Gen Hoshino) is directing his first anime at Animation Studio Seven with Takashi Nishikawa (Strange+, Nobunaga Teacher's Young Bride) serving as the animation director. Shigeru Murakoshi (Zombie Land Saga, The Seven Deadly Sins: Four Knights of the Apocalypse) is overseeing the series scripts, and Yuka Abe (animation director on Fire Force, Full Dive) is designing the characters. Night Tempo is producing the project's songs, and Slow Curve is planning and producing the project.
The first anime's theme song "Ushiroyubi Sasaregumi" gets a cover version by Shiraishi and Hasegawa, and is given a modern rearrangement by Night Tempo.
The anime will premiere in January and will run in Fuji TV network's Noitamina programming block on Fridays at 11:30 p.m. (9:30 a.m. EST).
The original story began in Shueisha's Weekly Shonen Jump magazine as the 3-Nen Kimengumi (Third-Year Funny-Face Club) manga in September 1980. When the characters graduated from junior high school to high school, the story changed its title to High School! Kimengumi, and continued running from 1982 to 1987.
The first television anime aired for 86 episodes between 1985 and 1987, and its hit nationwide success spawned a film in 1986 with the working English title Teenage Masked Tribe.
Hiroshi Fukutomi directed the first anime, and Hatsuki Tsuji and Hiroshi Kanazawa designed the characters. Shunsuke Kikuchi composed the music. The anime starred Issei Futamata, Kaneto Shiozawa, Miki Takahashi, Naoki Tatsuta, Naoko Matsui, Shigeru Chiba, and Tesshō Genda.
REMOW offered the first anime with English subtitles for the first time on YouTube this past summer.
Sources: New High School! Kimengumi anime's website, Comic Natalie
