Flash in Japan?

Anyone who's wandered through this rambling depository has possibly come up against the continuing enigma that is HeartCatch PreCure!, the seventh (and easily best) in the girls' anime concept series developed by Toei Animation to lasso young girls' hearts, their mums' wallets, and the imagination of otherwise cynical types who once dug Sailor Moon.

For the first 24 episodes after the show kicked off in February, the closing titles theme song was 'HeartCatch☆Paradise!' by PreCure regular Mayu Kudo - and as the YouTube gems below vividly display, it's been quite the hit here in Japan for the rather eccentric dance moves as much as for the groove (the first one is the real McCoy).

I think my favourite is the Blues Brothers inspired number.











A couple of months ago, however, as of episode 25, Toei up and changed the ending theme to a gospelly number (I guess as a reboot to incorporate the two new heroines, Cure Sunshine and Cure Moonlight). Repetitively titled 'Tomorrow Song 〜Song of Tomorrow〜', it's also performed by Kudo but this one has been slower on the fanbase - although it does seem to be picking up of late as you'll see below:

Takashi Miike vs. 13 Assassins

This news has been floating round for a bit but I've been waiting for more concrete info and images: Takashi Miike will this year be releasing his remake of 13 Assassins (Jûsan-nin no shikaku), the one-time 1963 B-movie jidaigeki drama (directed by Eiichi Kudo) which these days has a far better reputation and starred Kô Nishimura - a veteran of several movies by Akira Kurosawa.


The new version is now up on imdb.com but is a little threadbare in the details (the synopsis there says simply "A group of assassins come together for a suicide mission to kill an evil lord"); it looks like the stars are going to be Koji Yakusho, who shone in the original Japanese version of Shall We Dance as well as in Babel, and Yusuke Iseya - who I all-too-briefly met on the set of Jiro Shirasu last year.

Yep, Miike - responsible for some insanely cool, odd, and witheringly gory cinema over the past 15 years - is doing a samurai period film.