Tadanobu Asano? Yes. Shinji Aoyama? Yes. Verbal? Okay, I’m listening…
Tadanobu Asano, one of my favourite actors hands down, and Shinji Aoyama, director of Eureka, one of my favourite films hands down, are once again collaborating for “224466″, a sci-fi short for the digital omnibus R246 Story. The anthology connects comedy, drama, and documentary through the motif of Route 246, the national highway stretching from Tokyo to Shizuoka.
Asano’s contribution as director, with Aoyama as screenwriter, will see him in the role of an alien searching for his lost drum kit. As an extraterrestrial from a rock ‘n roll planet, the set is crucial to his existence.
An old man named Torakichi (Ryo Kase) and a wee girl called Shidomi (Ayane Omori) come to his aid and try to track down the one person who knows where the drum kit is: Osho (Masatoshi Nagase). To get the info out of him, Shidomi has to engage in a guitar battle with a boy axe wizard…
And as if the story wasn’t crazy enough and the cast wasn’t already stacked, Hirofumi Arai and Kosuke Toyohara are also set to star. Talk about an orgy of goodness.
Now for those who are scratching their heads, wondering how they got here by searching “m-flo“, let me answer your question. What does this have to do with Verbal? Well, the same thing it has to do with Shido Nakamura, Yusuke Santamaria, Genki Sudo, and Illmari (from Rip Slyme) — all are set to direct a piece. That’s right. m-flo frontman Verbal (aka Mr. V, Johnny Astro) is signed on to direct “Dead Noise”, a “documentary on the future of Japanese hip-hop exploring ideas of Japanese culture and identity through a series of interviews with major figures in the game (Ryuganji)”.
Well, I’ve already linked it twice today, but if you want to find out more about the project and/or J-cinema in general, head on over to Ryuganji.
