Popular anime series "City Hunter" has a new film for the first time in 20 years: "CITY HUNTER THE MOVIE: Shinjuku Private Eyes," which is now in theaters.
Even before the film was released, fans may have been waiting for the return of this stylish, urbane work with a mixture of hope and anxiety.
Voice actor Akira Kamiya, who plays lead character Ryo Saeba, had a similar reaction when he first heard about the production of the new film. He was glad, but also wondered: "Wait a minute. Is it even possible now?"
"City Hunter" is an action-packed comedy in which heroic hired gun Ryo receives various requests from clients and defeats evil while working outside the law. The anime is based on a manga of the same title by Tsukasa Hojo, who started the series in the weekly boys manga magazine Shonen Jump in 1985.
The TV anime series ran from 1987 to 1991, followed by TV specials after that.
Kamiya, a voice actor with a long and successful career since the 1970s, says Ryo is his favorite character among the countless roles he has played.
Kamiya had provided the voice for the protagonists in many TV anime works featuring giant robots, such as "Getta Robot" and "Yusha Reideen" (Reideen the Brave). He then added comical characters to his repertoire, such as Shutaro Mendo in "Urusei Yatsura" and the protagonist of "Kinnikuman" (Mr. Muscleman). In the anime adaptation of "Hokuto no Ken" (Fist of the North Star), he gave a nuanced performance as a complex hero.
Then came "City Hunter."
"Ryo was a character I needed to pull out all those stops to perform. He's kind, strong, cool, clumsy and a bit of a womanizer," Kamiya said.
He loves the character so much that he added Ryo's surname, Saeba, to the name of the management company he set up 20 years ago.
That is why he thought hard for a week when he received the offer for the role in the latest film.
"People have a more fixed image of the character now than when the original manga was turned into anime for the first time. I thought it was a job with a big responsibility," Kamiya said.
To bring back the Ryo from two decades ago, the voice actor rewatched the past works in the series and spent a year training to recover the pace and the speedy reactions needed to play the character. Moreover, after he finished recording his voice, he attended sound mixing sessions, something he had not done since his novice days.
He thus carefully watched the film's production process as if he were a producer.
"I could see that all the people involved in this work really love 'City Hunter.' This film is filled with love," he said.
He's absolutely right. First of all, the scriptwriter and the director did a great job in updating the anime's setting from 20 years ago while also depicting the lapse of time in between. In the old versions, those who had requests for Ryo were to write "XYZ" on a station message board. In the new film, his client, model Ai Shindo (voiced by Marie Iitoyo), takes a photo of the message written on the board with her smartphone and sends it to Ryo. A robot with artificial intelligence and drones also appear in the film, with their presence taken for granted.
On the other hand, the film also shows the series' obligatory scene early on, with Ryo's buddy, Kaori Makimura, hitting him hard with a "100-ton" hammer to punish him.
The film's fast-paced action sequence sweeps the audience into the story before they have time to get too nostalgic.
One of the main characters this time, IT company president Shinji Mikuni, is played by popular voice actor Koichi Yamadera. In the early days of "City Hunter," Yamadera was new to voice acting and supplied the voices for many minor roles in the series.
"He [Yamadera] is one of the people who have greatly contributed to the series," Kamiya said. "When I found out what kind of character [Mikuni] is, I thought he should be the one to do it, and it turned out I was spot on. I'm very glad he's back, this time playing one of the main characters despite his busy schedule."
Mikuni is an old friend of Kaori, whose childhood days are also featured in this ambitious film, which illuminates the passage of time from various perspectives.
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