Only a few months after news broke of Rurouni Kenshin getting reworked into a new TV series, there's now word that a long-rumored live-action adaptation of the post-samurai-era story is in fact in the works.
Tokyohive has reported actor Sato Takeru (of Goemon and the live-action Beck) will be taking the lead role of Kenshin Himura, with a Japanese release scheduled for sometime in 2012. The director, Keishi Otomo, was previously responsible for Ryōmaden, the 49th NHK taiga, a yearly series of big-budget historical dramas made for Japanese TV which typically draw large audiences.
Kenshin itself has legendary status amongst anime and manga fans. Its story of a former assassin who mended his violent ways after the end of the samurai era was originally published as a manga from 1994 through 1999, and adapted (with some distortion) into a TV series that ran from 1996 through 1999. The TV series has gone through multiple printings in English and syndicated internationally on TV as well.
No word has been circulated yet about the storyline for the film version. Fans of the original manga were rightfully annoyed by the way the third season of the TV series deviated broadly from the original story, something that the new anime version might well fix.
The production company will be the Japanese arm of Warner Brothers, although that doesn't automatically imply a foreign release. A number of other WB Japan films (e.g., Sakuya Yokaidan) have never been released in domestic editions. That said, I can't imagine this not being licensed for English-speaking territories given the built-in fanbase for it.
On a more speculative note, I'm wondering about the visual style the filmmakers will use for this project -- whether or not, for instance, they'll use the "blue-screen backlot" look of a film like Goemon (Japan's samurai-and-ninja answer to 300) or go with the more restrained, realistic look of a classic samurai-era film (e.g., Takashi Miike's 13 Assassins). Given the over-the-top nature of some of the story elements, they'll probably lean towards the first look since it's hard to show some of the things Kenshin does with his reverse-bladed sword and keep a straight face.
Image: Rurouni Kenshin. Image courtesy Pricegrabber.
Comments
This is the first I am hearing of a live action movie and new anime series and it has got me excited. I really do expect them to remove the third season completely when reworking this masterpiece. I had not read the manga at all when originally watching that arc and it was just terrible story telling. Hopefully they will fully animate everything with Enishi until the end of the manga. Some of that story can be watched in the Samurai X movie Reflections.