The land of Kawaii and Sugoi vs. Japan: an interesting perspective.

If you look at the right-hand column of my blog, you will notice a new link. I'm now linking to the blog of Patrick Macias, a Mexican-American expatriate living in and writing about Japan. It is concentrated Ota-kool. The guy's got a podcast, "Hot Tears of Shame" which is half his own whacked out stories and half conversations with some of his fellow Gaijin expat buddies.

One of the tidbits found on the blog is info about Oshii Mamoru's newest project: Tachiguishi Retsuden. From the trailer, it looks like this is a weird mixture of animation, live action and live action footage digitally "reanimated" to turn humans into super-deformed cartoon characters. Whoa momma! This is going to rock and rock hard. Some of the biggest names in Anime are "actors" in this movie, including composer Kawaii Kenji, character designer Kawamori Shoji who is legendary for his Mecha design for the Macross series, Studio Ghibli producer Suzuki Toshio, and President of Production IG Ishikawa Mitsuhisa.

You'd better have a good noodle shop or Japanese family restaurant near the theatre when this finally makes it to theatres in the US, because you are probably going to walk out of this movie about as hungry as you were after seeing another movie about the Japanese obsession with food, Tampopo. This was put out in Japan by Production IG, so I suspect that since they have some really tight connections with the American movie industry now this will get licensed and released, at least as a direct-to-DVD. Perhaps Sony Classics, which was responsible for the release of "Innocence: Ghost In The Shell II" might be the responsible party.

Oh yeah, the title is rendered by Production IG's English-language site as "Tachigui: The Amazing Lives Of The Fast-Food Grifters." Another rendering of the Japanese is "The Legendary Masters of Eating While Standing." I think perhaps a good title for American consumption would be "Want Fries With That?" This movie could be a neat bookend for the upcoming Clerks II. Itadekimasu!