FsJ8 "Temjin"

I'll post later about the Amazon Japan shipment I received last week with some great Oshii-related stuff, but I thought I'd say a bit first about the figure you see in the picture here. It's apparently called the FsJ8 "Temjin" and it's from one of Oshii's segments of the "Shin Onna Tachiguishi Retsuden" film. It has to be the coolest mech I've seen in quite a while. I'm not into the whole toy/figure collecting scene, but I'd totally buy this figure if it didn't run a cool 35,000 yen (that's ~US$305).

Oshii and Murphy's Irish Stout: Last Orders CM

I was just checking out Oshii's IMDB listing a couple of days ago and noticed an entry I had never seen before -- a commercial called "Murphy's Irish Stout: Last Orders." Oshii made a commercial in the late 1990s? How had this previously escaped my attention?

However, I couldn't find much to back up the assertion that Oshii was involved in this project. The official Production IG listing for the commercial just lists Hiroyuki Kitakubo as director with character design and animation by Kazuchika Kise. (The Production IG 15th anniversary book lists the same scant info for the commercial.) I can't find any other print resource in Japanese or English that associates Oshii with this commercial.

So I'm pretty that Oshii didn't have anything to do with the "Murphy's Irish Stout: Last Orders" commercial.

Shin Onna Tachigui Retsuden premieres

ANN as a brief writeup of the Shin Onna Tachigui Retsuden premiere at TIFF: Oshii Introduces Tachigui Sequel at Tokyo Film Fest. There are many reasons I would have liked to have been there, of course, not least of which is to witness Oshii's "flamboyant red carpet entrance."

Oshii in Variety

Via ANN, a new article in Variety titled "Anime films follow new inspirations: Evolving format aims to reach wider audience" briefly covers some of the new developments in anime, one of which is Oshii's upcoming film The Sky Crawlers:

Likewise, Production I.G's "The Sky Crawlers," which is set to unspool in Japan next year, will contain a romantic theme. For the pic, in which a society of children lives in eternal adolescence, helmer Mamoru Oshii ("Ghost in the Shell") decided to work with young scriptwriter Chihiro Itou so that his message could reach his intended audience.

"Nowadays, there are many stories in live-action and animation that are targeting young people," producer Tomohiko Ishii explains. "However, very few of them have earnestly depicted the reality that youngsters are actually living in."

It'll be really interesting to see what they come up with for the film. The screenwriter Chihiro Ito previously wrote the scripts for the films Crying out Love, in the Center of the World (aka Socrates in Love, in the English adaptation of the original novel) and Spring Snow (Haru no Yuki, the recent film version of the Mishima novel). It's been a while since Oshii has worked with a screenwriter other than Kazunori Ito (no relation to Chihiro, I assume).

GRM

When I next revisit Oshii's work as a whole (perhaps to write a follow-up to Stray Dog of Anime), I'm really going to need to pay more attention to GRM. It's a CG project that was originally going to follow Ghost in the Shell, but it never came to be, although much of its look and feel was turned into what became Avalon.

There's some information on this project floating around the web (in particular, check out the old official website through Archive.org), and more has been written in Japanese in some of the books on Oshii I have on my bookshelf.

Anyway, this post was prompted by some interesting GRM footage I stumbled across on YouTube:

Coverage in Goethe magazine

The Japanese magazine Goethe has been running some interesting coverage of Oshii as in preparation for his upcoming film Sky Crawlers. The first part of the coverage is up online as a PDF here. The second volume of coverage is in the November issue of the magazine, which I just ordered from Amazon Japan. (Along with a preorder for the Kerberos x Tachiguishi collection and the upcoming December issue of Comic Ryu, which is supposed to come with a special Shin Onna Tachiguishi Retsuden navigate DVD.)

Tachiguishi in Cineaste

In the Fall 2007 edition of Cineaste, Rahul Hamid's coverage of the Jeonju Film Festival has a couple of paragraphs focusing on Tachiguishi Retsuden, and includes a promo pic of Moongaze Ginji.

Project Mermaid video

How did I miss this before? Oshii's "Project Mermaid" posted on YouTube:

After all that, it's not quite as interesting as I thought it would be.