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Japanese Film Festival 2016 in Jakarta to Screen The Boy and the Beast

The Japan Foundation, Jakarta announced on Tuesday that it's Japanese Film Festival 2016 event will screen the Indonesian premiere of Mamoru Hosoda's The Boy and The Beast film, as well as both live-action film adaptations of Yuki Suetsugu's Chihayafuru manga. The event will take place at the Cinemaxx Theater in Jakarta on November 24 to 27.

The event will also screen the What a Wonderful Family (Kazoku wa Tsurai yo!), Creepy, and Tsukiji Wonderland live-action films.

The story of The Boy and The Beast is set in the human realm (Tokyo's Shibuya ward) and the bakemono realm ("Jūtengai"). In these two worlds that must not intersect, there lives a lonely boy and a lonely bakemono. One day, the boy gets lost in the bakemono world, becomes the disciple of the bakemono Kumatetsu, and is renamed Kyūta.

Hosoda (Summer Wars, Wolf Children) created and scripted the movie. The film is Hosoda's first film since 2012, when his relatively new animation movie company Studio Chizu released Wolf Children as its first project. Masakatsu Takagi (Wolf Children) scored the soundtrack.

The film debuted at #1 in the Japanese box-office in July 2015 and earned 667,035,100 yen (about US$5.4 million) in its first two days. The film eventually surpassed the total box office earnings of Hosoda's previous film, Wolf Children. The film was the second-highest grossing domestic film in Japan in 2015.

The story of Chihayafuru centers on Chihaya Ayase. In her childhood, she befriended the boys Arata Wataya and Taichi Mashima. They bonded over the game of competitive karuta, based on classic Japanese poems. When Arata had to move away, the friends go their separate ways. Chihaya and Taichi meet again in high school, and are quick to pick the game back up, starting a competitive club in their school. But upon contacting Arata again, he says that he has abandoned the game for personal reasons.

The first film, Chihayafuru: Kami no Ku (Chihayafuru: Upper Phrase), opened in Japan on March 19. The second film, Chihayafuru: Shimo no Ku (Chihayafuru: Lower Phrase), opened in Japan on April 29. A sequel film has been greenlit.

Norihiro Koizumi (Midnight Sun, Kanojo wa Uso o Ai Shisugiteru) directed both films, and they films starred Suzu Hirose, Shūhei Nomura, and Mackenyu as Chihaya, Taichi, and Arata, respectively.

Suetsugu launched the manga in Kodansha's Be Love magazine in December 2007, and Kodansha published the manga's 32nd volume on July 13. The series inspired the first 25-episode television anime season from October 2011 to March 2012, and the second 25-episode season aired in Japan from January-June 2013.

[Via Kaori Nusantara]