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Live-Action Patlabor Casts Ghibli Co-Founder Toshio Suzuki
posted on by Egan Loo
Toshio Suzuki, the famed co-founder and former producer of Studio Ghibli, is making a cameo in the sixth episode of the live-action project The Next Generation -Patlabor-. Suzuki will play a shady "Neppūsha" agent. The agent produces a music video for the song that summons the episode's centerpiece, a sea monster. ("Neppūsha" literally means "hot wind company" in Japanese, and "ghibli" was originally the Libyan term for "hot wind blowing across the Sahara.")
Episode 6 "Daikaijū Arawaru Kōhen" (A Giant Monster Appears Part II) is the second half of a story about a mysterious giant sea creature. The story starts when a surfer suddenly disappears at sea. At the same time, a large sea monster appears. At the beach, marine biologist Nobuko Nanami is researching the incident, but the Section 2 Division 2 team just happened to be vacationing at the same seaside. They are caught in the investigation when the visiting tourists are excited to see a large robot like Labor fight a sea monster.
The episode will play with episode 7 ("Time Dokan") in the project's fourth theatrical run, which will start on August 30. Below is the poster and trailer for the ongoing third theatrical run, which includes the first half of the sea monster story. (Miina Tominaga, the voice actress of the Mobile Police Patlabor anime's lead character Noa Izumi, and Patlabor's Asuma Shinohara voice actor Toshio Furukawa returned to the franchise to voice roles in the first half.)
Mamoru Oshii is chief director of this project, and he has been a longtime close friend of Suzuki. Suzuki produced Oshii's Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, and he played Cold Badger Masa in Oshii's Fast Food Grifters film.
