Damn that one groovy movie trailer I wanna see it!

OOO IT'S PRETTY AND SHINY

Also I dig the music.

Count me in. I'm totally not above watching this for the pretty.

This looks good, and that's not just my current Romeo and Juliet fascination talking (although seeing it performed as ballet can do that... Benvolio's butt was hypnotic, btw.)

And now, a translated website!!
---
About
It shall not be two blades that cross, but two pure hearts...
This is the tale of the love between two youths.
However, it is perhaps a tale too tragic to call "love".

The stage is set in the levitating city of New Verona

Under the rule of the Capulet family,
In this place made proud by the prosperity brought by the grace of some mysterious power,
Peace has become a thing of the past,
Since the mutiny of the Montague family 14 years ago.

In the misadministration of a despot, the gap between rich and poor is plain as day.

Born of the blood of the Capulet dynasty,
And their single survivor - Juliet
The enemy of her parents - the dictator's son, Romeo

Cruel fate brings these two together, that they may fall in love.

Character
Romeo
Son of the current Archduke of New Verona
Disagreeing with his father's methods, he travels the city in order to see how the lower classes fare.
He has a fiancee, decided upon by his father, but, not knowing true love, he cannot commit.
He falls in love with Juliet, only to learn later that she is the daughter of the Capulets, whom his father destroyed.

Juliet
Raised as a beauty in boy's clothing,
She is a young woman steeped in righteousness, who will not leave behind those who rebel against the Montagues.
She grows up with the surviving retainers of the Capulet family, and on her sixteenth birthday is told the truth of her past.
Upon encountering Romeo, this maiden unknowing of love awakens to it.

Cast

Romeo: Masahiro Mizushima
Juliet: Shie Minazawa
Curio: Kousuke Torigai
Fransisco: Yasuo Yajima
Cordelia: Miu Matsurai (?) [I can't really work out the reading of the name]
Antonio: Ryou Hirobashi
Hermione: Sayaka Oohara
Montague: Yasuhide Ishii
Tybalt: Ryuutarou Okiai
Emilia: Ayako Kawasumi
Benvolio: Shinnosuke Tachibana
Mercutio: Tetsuya Kakihara
Porcia: Aya Hisagawa (?)
---

I'd do the production cast, but brain = teh fried tonight...

Giovanna wrote:

Almaser wrote:

Raised as a beauty in boy's clothing

You know, far be it for me, an Utena fan, to say this...but is Japan completely incapable of producing a female lead that isn't dressed in boy's clothes? Seriously? No, I mean seriously??

Oh, c'mon, Utena is 1 in 10000 >_> see all the shoujo protagonist...

....

OK, guys, um. I'm all for the action, for the awesomely cool designs, for the anime-ification of the story, but... what? Last of the Capulets? WHAT?

BUT THIS IS SHAKESPEARE. *dead*

I guess Twelfth Night didn't have enough opportunities for flying horses for 'em.

I'm not a huge R&J fan. It's been way overdue for a beef injection of awesome.

I'll watch it.

I agree that Romeo and Juliet is one of Shakespeare's weaker plays. I myself don't like it very much, and I'm a Shakespeare fan (Hamlet rocks my socks off, and I was named after a character in one of his later plays). The problem was that Romeo and Juliet didn't have any tragic flaws, unlike any of Shakespeare's other heroes or heroines in his other tragedies. Romeo and Juliet were too perfect - they were immature, yes, but it is the flaws of their family members which end up leading to their demise, not their own tragic flaws.

Anyway, all that aside, this looks like a very promising adaptation. Its really nice to see Romeo and Juliet get an actual adaptation, not just some updating of it, but a full-on reimagining. And the animation is wicked pretty.

As an aside, why do people always want to be like Romeo and Juliet when in love? I mean, why do people want to be someone's Romeo? I mean, these guys commit suicide in the end, they don't end up happily ever after! Wouldn't you rather be, I don't know, Hermia and Lysander? They end up happily ever after, after all!

They were hormone driven kids. Even if you do take shorter lifespans and people getting married a lot earlier they probably couldn't be pinned much older than 22. The story/folk tale was popular among people roughly the same age as Romeo and Juliet and if anything is more appealing than galliant romantic love to teenagers it's martyrdome. I'm pretty sure suicide is right up there with drunk driving as a leading cause of preventable death in that age group.

R&J is two great tastes that go great together.

Of course it's stupid and the characters were stupid. People around that age (typically) aren't very bright.

Hinotori wrote:

They were hormone driven kids. Even if you do take shorter lifespans and people getting married a lot earlier they probably couldn't be pinned much older than 22. The story/folk tale was popular among people roughly the same age as Romeo and Juliet and if anything is more appealing than galliant romantic love to teenagers it's martyrdome.

Dude, I read it when I was 14, and I thought they were being dumb then.

As for ages, Juliet was, at the very oldest, 14 in the play, and Romeo was 15 or 16.

I think it's generally supposed to illustrate how tragic and sudden and overwhelming (young) love can be. I mean, honestly, if you look at most romances ever depicted, there's not really a whole lot of reasoning going on there either, it just happens more slowly. Stories like R&J have been told for a very long time; you kind of have to abandon a modern sensibility and try to understand it on its own terms. Of course it's exaggerated - that's part of the point. Everything's amplified in theater.

I tend to tune out who's actually talking and pay attention to the friggin' awesome line/meter/imagery. The language is absolutely gorgeous. It helps if you're a poetry geek.

All of that said, I can list like 10 plays of Shakespeare's off the top of my head which kick R&J's ass.

Last edited by Syna (12-12-2006 07:07:06 AM)

I think it does work in script form in the sense that you can really appreciate the poetry of it, which you can't do as well in theater. But it is meant to be performed, and anyway, there are some damn good Shakespeare adaptations out there. Like, SERIOUS good. I've never really seen an author translated to screen that consistently well. So no shame.

Tamago wrote:

Hinotori wrote:

I'm not a huge R&J fan. It's been way overdue for a beef injection of awesome.

Being in this ofrum has warped my innocent mind. You wrote Beef Injection and the first thing I thought of was Akio...how scary is that?

It's not scary so much as it is completely normal.