Projects funded by “K2P Film Fund I”
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© Hiroya Oku, Seven Seas
The K2 Pictures movie and video works company announced at the Cannes International Film Festival on Sunday that its “K2P Film Fund I” will finance several projects, including a theatrical anime adaptation of Hiroya Oku’s GIGANT manga and a musical film adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s experimental The Book of Human Insects manga.
The GIGANT anime adaptation marks the studio’s first animated feature project.
Seven Seas Entertainment licensed the manga, and it describes the story:
Rei Yokoyamada, a high schooler whose father works for a film production company, is inspired to create his own short film with his friends. One day, while out to find actors, he spots tabloid-like notices that the adult film star Papico lives in his area. When he takes them down to protect her, he runs into the woman herself. Little does he know that Papico is about to get dragged into a strange, supernatural happening…where she grows to the size of a giant!
Oku launched the manga in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Superior magazine in December 2017. The series ended in September 2021. The 10th and final compiled book volume shipped in Japan in December 2021.
Ken Ninomiya will direct the Osamu Tezuka 100th Anniversary Project The Book of Human Insects musical film, which was pitched at the “Spotlight on Japan” event held at Berlin’s European Film Market in February.
Veritcal publishes the title in English and describes the story:
Still in her early twenties, beautiful Toshiko Tomura (b. 1947) has won the Akutagawa Prize for her story “The Book of Human Insects.” The great honor is not her first: she has previously won the New York Design Academy Award, before which she was the lead actress of an established theatrical troupe. Yet, while the media go abuzz, the woman in the limelight slips away from the metropolis; what the sole paparazzo who manages to trail her to an abandoned country house witnesses is an immobile figure of an old woman and the star herself, naked, in a reverie as bizarre as it is erotic…
Featuring a noir cast of jaded journalists, anarchist hit men, right-wing shadow brokers, cutthroat executives, and spent artists, The Book of Human Insects traces the career of an ingenue who is every bit those men’s match but is far from a feminist role model. In step with a heroine who is equally self-seeking, the usually “humanist” author here achieves with a Wellesian smirk a portrait of a world without heroes.
The story inspired a live-action television series adaptation in 2011.
The official website for Tezuka announced on May 12 that NHK is producing a live-action television special based on the creator’s autobiographical manga short “Paper Fortress” (“Kami no Toride”) in August.
Sources: K2 Pictures, Deadline (Liz Shackleton)
