News

Kenyuu Horiuchi, More Star in Joker Game Anime's Cast

The official Twitter account for the anime based on Kōji Yanagi's spy mystery novel Joker Game announced the main cast on Friday. Kenyuu Horiuchi will star as Lieutenant Colonel Yūki, pictured below.

Other cast members include:

From left to right in image below:

• Kenjirō Tsuda as Jirō Kamō
• Jun Fukuyama as Jitsui
• Yoshimasa Hosoya as Adagiri
• Tomokazu Seki as sakuma.
• Kazuya Nakai as Fukumoto

From left to right in image below:

• Ryōhei Kimura as Kaminaga
• Takahiro Sakurai as Tasaki
• Hiro Shimono as Miyoshi
• Yūki Kaji as Hatano
• Toshiyuki Morikawa as Amari

The series will premiere in April 2016.

Kazuya Nomura (Ghost in the Shell: New Movie, Robotics;Notes) will helm the project at Production I.G. Toshiyuki Yahagi (Guilty Crown) is serving as chief animation director and is adapting Shirow Miwa's (Dogs: Bullets & Carnage) original character designs. Taku Kishimoto (Haikyu!!, ERASED) is helming series composition and writing the scripts. Kenji Kawai (Ghost in the Shell, Barakamon) is scoring the music. Other staff members include:

• Chief Researcher: Seiichi Shirato
• Art Director: Yoshio Tanioka
• Art Setting: Iho Narita
• 3D CGI: Sublimation
• Color Key: Sayoko Noda
• Special Effects: Masahiro Murakami
• Director of Photography: Hiroshi Tanaka
• Editing: Junichi Uematsu
• Sound Director: Yoshikazu Iwanami

The original novel is set in 1937, before World War II begins in earnest. Lieutenant Colonel Yūki of the Imperial Japanese Army forms the "D Agency," an army intelligence outfit under his command and tutelage. Army General Staff attaches Lieutenant sakuma. to observe the unit's performance. D Agency casts a wide net to find agents beyond Japanese military personnel, and Yūki establishes D Agency's tenets, which go against IJA doctrine: "Don't kill, don't get killed, don't get captured." With this, Yūki trains a team of operatives who conduct missions against domestic and foreign powers.

Yanagi published the original Joker Game novel (pictured above) in 2008. The novel won the Nihon Suiri Sakka Kyōkai-shō (Mystery Writers of Japan) award in 2009. Yū Irie directed a live-action adaptation of the novel, which premiered in Japan on January 31. Yanagi followed up the original novel with three sequel novels — titled Double Joker, Paradise Lost, and Last Waltz — in 2009, 2012, and 2015, respectively. The series has more than 1 million copies in print.

[Via Moca News]