Even if youre a complete novice when it comes to anime, chances are that youll have at least heard of the likes of Ghost in the Shell and The Sky Crawlers, and those films both came from the acclaimed Japanese director Mamoru Oshii. He also directed the 2001 live-action movie Avalon, and Oshii is now set to make his first live-action English-language film with The Last Druid: Garm Wars.
The story is described as taking place in a world of war known as Annwyn, where clone soldiers from three military tribes are locked in a perpetual battle of air, land and technology. One clone, Khara, is separated from the battle and finds herself on the run with a group of unlikely companions, and together they seek to know more about their existence. It sounds to us like a project that could work perfectly in anime form, but Oshii looks set for a change of pace with this one.
In fact, the project has been in development since as far back as 1995, when it was envisaged as a mixture of animation, live-action and computer graphics. Oshii explained that the digital environment at the time wasnt advanced enough back then. The project in its current format has an English-language script penned by Geoffrey Gunn (Fangs of War), which Oshii has also collaborated on, and is being produced by a Canadian company The Nakamura Group Advantage (which might be the best production company name ever). The project sounds fairly ambitious, so it may be some time before we actually see the finished product.
