Thursday 21 July 2011

Afro Samurai fans rejoice Samuel L Jackson is finally turning his iconic Anime performance into a live action film. Mother F.....!

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If you’ve never caught Afro Samurai you really should give it a go. (come around and watch my Blu-ray of it, bring cake!, and popcorn!)  A brilliant fusion of Japanese and American animated story telling it was my favourite Christmas present a few years back. Samuel L Jackson leant his distinctive voice to the titular character and his sidekick / alter ego Ninja Ninja. Ron Perlman also did fine work as the man who killed his father. The Anime, which was adapted from Takeshi Okazak’s Manga, by Okazak himself and the follow up TV movie won a primetime Emmy; the first Anime ever to do so.




The story, which is typically surreal, involves a world where everyone who considers himself a badass seeks out the undisputed champion of all things combat, the wearer of the number one Headband. The only way to get to challenge this “god” is to fight your way through the current wearers of headbands 2 – 12, in the correct order. There’s no backing out if you’re challenged, you fight, you win or you die. Having witnessed his father’ decapitation by the number 2 challenger Afro becomes an orphan and devotes his entire being to hunting down his father’s killer so that he can find out how he was killed (it is a mystery) and exact revenge. This single mindedness leads him to make some harsh choices and we see the effects of some of these choices (many of them less than heroic) in flashback as we follow Afro on his journey to the number one headband, through challengers and mysterious groups who want the  number one headband for their own purposes. Impossibly long Katana,  huge Afro; Rocket launchers and cyborgs, I’m far more hopeful for this than the live action Akira film.



Ever since the very successful broadcast of the first series of the, extremely violent, cartoon we’ve been waiting for confirmation that the live action version was really going to happen. Now the TV movie and a console game later it is finally happening.


I hope that they are able to keep The RZA involved in the music as his work on the shows was outstanding and perfectly fit the tone of the show. His work on Blade Trinity was pretty decent too. The animation for the show is beautiful, especially wen you consider it is TV animation and not a motion picture.

Am I the only one who is thinking all stops should be plled out to get one of these three directors onboard. Park Chan-Wook (Oldboy, Lady Vengeance), Takeshi Miike (Ichi The Killer,  13 Assassins) or Mr Tarantino (seriously you know who tarantino is!) (Luc Besson (Leon, Nikita, 5th Elemet, Extrordinary adventures of Adele Blanc Sec) would do nicely too)?

The film is due to cast  this year and shoot next year.

Altogether now..

A man with no friends, only live for revenge
Live his life off the henge, cut, through a thousand men
Blade swing with the force of a cyclone
Cut crystal and bone, pistol and chrome
Stand in my path, you're a dead man
I cut the whole world in half for the Number One headband
Quest of a lonely soul, on a lonely road

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