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Takashi Miike's Live-Action Crows Zero Released Monday
posted on by Andrew Osmond
MVM will release Takashi Miike's live-action film Crows Zero on Monday April 9. It is a prequel to a manga, Crows, by Hiroshi Takahashi. According to MVM's website, Miike's follow-up, Crows Zero II, will be released in July.
In this schoolyard brawl film, the setting is an all-boys school full of delinquents and gangsters. The students defend different turfs according to grade levels, classes and reputation. Shun Oguri (Hana Yori Dango, Gokusen, Fullmetal Alchemist The Movie) plays the delinquent Genji, who aims to unite the teenage gangs.
The original Crows manga ran for 26 volumes, and its sequel, Worst, was partially published in English by Digital Manga Publishing. Crows was also made into a two-episode anime OVA, the 1994 Koukou Butouden Crows.
The prolific director Takashi Miike is famed for such live-action films as the critically-acclaimed samurai film 13 Assassins, the horrific Audition, and the grisly manga adaptation Ichi the Killer. His superhero comedy Yatterman (based on a 1977 anime) will be released on DVD/Blu-ray on May 21, through Eureka. (It was previously scheduled for March.)
Monday also sees the release of the two Pokémon feature films which opened together in Japanese cinemas in July 2011. In the U.K., the films are released in a double-pack; they are Pokémon the Movie: Black - Victini and Reshiram and Pokémon the Movie: White - Victini and Zekrom. The pack will also include a bonus game card.
In Japan, the same theaters showed both films, one after another. They feature two different legendary Pokémon — the black hero Zekrom appears before people who seek the pure "ideal," while the white hero Reshiram appears before people who seek the pure "truth." The two characters are pivotal Pokémon in the games Pokémon Black and White.
Taken together, the films earned more than $50 million at Japanese cinemas. They jointly comprise the second highest-earning anime cinema title of 2011, though they were narrowly surpassed by Studio Ghibli's From Up On Poppy Hill.
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