This Week in Japan: Look Back, Shot on Film
Three stories and a schedule slip. A Palme d'Or winner adapted a one-shot manga and shot it on film in the author's hometown. Konami made a Yu-Gi-Oh short for a dead man's art show and is turning a 1998 RPG into a TV series in the same month. And Bleach pushed two episodes to October. In that order.
Kore-eda made Look Back live-action, and it opened at five
Tatsuki Fujimoto's Look Back is a 2021 one-shot about two girls who draw manga, and the 2024 anime film of it did numbers nobody expected from a 58 minute movie. The live-action version is by Hirokazu Kore-eda, who wrote, directed, and edited it. Natsuki Deguchi is Fujino, Aju Makita is Kyomoto. K2 Pictures. 99 minutes. Shot on 35mm, mostly in Nikaho, Akita, which is Fujimoto's hometown. It premiered in competition at Venice on September 6, picked up three side awards there, and opened in Japan September 11 at number five while Chiikawa held number one for another week.
A Kore-eda film about people making things, on real film stock, in the town the manga came from. That is not an adaptation looking for a franchise. That is a director who read a 140 page comic and took it personally. Fujimoto has said publicly he liked it. Fifth place behind a cat-thing is fine. Real.
Konami, twice
Konami released a new Yu-Gi-Oh short animation to mark KAZUKI TAKAHASHI: YU-GI-OH! ART WORKS, an exhibition of Takahashi's original artwork running December 12 through February 21, 2027 at Creative Museum Tokyo. The manga started serialization in 1996, so this is the 30th anniversary. Yugi, Kaiba, Blue-Eyes, Domino City. Takahashi died in 2022 at 60, so the exhibition is the first big retrospective he will not be at. The Yu-Gi-Oh anime production committee made the short. If you own a card from that first era, this is the winter it gets looked at again. One of those is here, a 2002 Dark Duel Stories promo, PSA 8, and that is the only inventory link in this post.
Same company, different desk: Suikoden: The Anime premieres October 3, adapting Suikoden II, the 1998 PlayStation RPG that people who played it will not stop talking about. Konami's in-house animation studio is making it, Yuzo Sato directs, episode one is a one hour special. Highland Kingdom versus the City-States of Jowston, the hero and Jowy in the Unicorn Youth Brigade. Konami sat on Suikoden for most of a decade and then, inside two years, put out the HD remasters and a full anime. Whatever changed inside that building, it changed. Cool.
Bleach slips two episodes to October
Thousand-Year Blood War Part 4, The Calamity, is delaying episodes 49 and 50 to October 19 and 26 on TV Tokyo. The stated reason is to improve quality as the anime approaches its climax. Episode 47 already had a streaming delay on September 5. TV Tokyo is running Climax Selection reruns on September 19, 26, October 5, and 12 to fill the slots.
Improve quality is the phrase every studio uses and it is the phrase that is actually true this time, because The Calamity is the last stretch and the schedule has been visibly strained since the episode 47 slip. A four week hole in the final cour of a 25 year property is not a scheduling choice anyone makes on purpose. It is what happens when the alternative is airing it anyway. Take the delay. The alternative is worse.
On the desk
Nothing new came in. The three loops stay where they were. If you have been following this section for the ranking of a show about a cat that smokes, you are the target reader for this blog, and I am sorry. Next week, or the one after.