Director : Mamoru Oshii
Who needs story when you can have sword fights? The brainchild of anime auteur Oshii Mamoru, Kill is a four-part live-action anthology that cuts straight to the chase with four action-climax shorts from four different filmmakers. Other than Oshii Mamoru himself, the other directors signed up for some katakana action are Fukasaku Kenta (Battle Royale 2), Tahara Minoru, and Tsujimoto Takanori who also directed a segment in Oshii's 2007 omnibus project The Women of Fast Food. Each director crafted an original action segment as if it was the climax for a complete film.
A follow-up to his Assault Girl segment in The Women of Fast Food, Oshii's Assault Girl 2 sees two women dressed in black and white (Babel's Kikuchi Rinko and Fujita Yoko) facing off with swords in an open field. Returning to the familiar territory of surreal youth violence, Fukasaku Kenta's Kodomo-Zamurai is set in an elementary school with a bullying problem where the students speak in samurai and carry swords in their backpacks. A high school girl sets out to avenge her murdered family in Tsujimoto Takanori's Kilico. Tahara Minoru's Zan-Gun revolves around a soldier and a haunted sword that seeks blood. |