Word: comicalities
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...With her big-eyed visage gazing down from the nation's billboards and Jumbotrons, Sato is the face of Japan's latest film fashion: a slew of classic cartoons remade as live-action movies. Forget about Spider-Man 2, this summer's much-hyped American comic-book film; Spidey is just a gaijin in a tight suit. From the lithe, demon-slaying Devilman to the clunky robot Iron Man 28, Japan has its own superhero pantheon that is ripe for recycling on the big screen. The Japanese love of cartoon heroes started with the birth in 1952 of Astro...
...original Cutie Honey comic, which debuted in 1973, was an X-rated, gory riot of impossibly proportioned heroines and female villains doing battle in varying stages of undress. Cutie Honey herself was a voluptuous android barely in control of her own powers, whose girlish personality contrasted with her zeal for bloody combat. A subsequent animated TV series toned the action down to a Saturday-morning-cartoon level and introduced Cutie Honey to a much larger audience...
...early 1970s comic and cartoon that inspired Devilman, a CGI-heavy movie due out in the fall, helped create a template for the fanged and tentacled demons that populate Japanese pop culture today. Devilman is the alter ego of mild-mannered schoolboy Akira Fudo, who becomes possessed by a long-dormant demonic force. The story details his struggle to bring that force under control and use it to fight other, more malevolent, demons. Like Casshern, virtually every frame in Devilman blends live action and computer graphics. Judging by segments that have been completed, Devilman will be a lush, Gothic-flavored...
...current remakes are dark and violent. Ninja Hattori-kun (Hattori the Ninja)?based on a 1960s comic and 1980s cartoon of the same name?comes out in August and stars Shingo Katori, of the popular boy band SMAP, as an overearnest ninja who moves from a feudal village to modern Tokyo, where he serves a nine-year-old master. Hattori speaks in outdated formalities, struggles to maintain the ninja code of self-concealment in the crowded city, and ends up in all sorts of trouble. The other big-ticket remake now in the works is Tetsujin 28-go (Iron...
...imagination. "People have special feelings for the older anim?. They're simpler and more innocent," says Cutie Honey star Sato, a longtime fan of the heroine she plays. Her director, Anno, takes a crankier view. "Japanese people can't grow up," he says. "When they're not reading comics and watching cartoons, they go to see movies about cartoon characters. It's sad." Whatever the reason, there's no denying the needs of a nation of comic-book nerds?and with a legion of superheroes waiting in the wings, it's a good bet that more of them will...