Live-action Lupin III looks amazing!

For those of you who aren’t familiar with Lupin III (ルパン三世), it’s a long-running manga series written and drawn by Monkey Punch (a pen name) about master thief Arsène Lupin III, who is the grandson of Maurice Leblanc’s gentleman thief Arsène Lupin (and Monkey Punch didn’t get permission to use Arsène Lupin, which lead to rights problems outside of Japan until Arsène Lupin entered public domain in France.) The series has run since 1967, and has spawned numerous anime series, films, OVAs, live-acton television shows, and a 1974 live-action film entitled Lupin III Strange Psychokinetic Strategy (ルパン三世 念力珍作戦). And the big news is the new live-action film directed by Ryuhei Kitamura (of Godzilla: Final Wars fame) that comes out August 30th.

The live-action film will star Shun Oguri as Lupin III, Meisa Kuroki as Fujiko Mine, Tetsuji Tamayama as Daisuke Jigen, Go Ayano as Goemon Ishikawa XIII, and Tadanobu Asano as Inspector Koichi Zenigata. And thanks to some recently release publicity images, you can see they are going for a style that’s similar to the classic character styles and looks fantastic. Hopefully the film will live up to the art and be a great ride!

Shun Oguri trained for 10 months to do the action sequences as Lupin III, and the filming locations are across Asia, with some local stars thrown in for box office juice. I’ve never watched any of the anime or read the manga, but this looks and sounds cool enough from the promotional material that it’s on my “must watch” list, especially since Ryuhei Kitamura is directing and Tadanobu Asano is in it!

via itMedia and AsianWiki