Takeru Sato

Actor transforms into horses, eats himself in new ad-Can you think of a better way to sell ramen?

When I was first exposed to Japanese commercials, it seemed like every one of them was off-the-rails insane. Filled with breathless rapid-fire speech punctuated by seemingly pointless pauses for some unknown dramatic or comedic effect, each ad seemed to be end as soon as it began, often giving little, if any, mention of its product.

Things seem to have calmed down considerably in recent years, though, with a trend towards a bit more restraint and comprehensibility, under the solid logic that if the audience is left paralyzed from their minds snapping as they try to process what they just saw, they won’t be able to go to the store and buy your products.

Still, every once in a while, a marketing team decides to just go for broke and tries to raise the bar for commercial craziness, and this new Cup Noodle ad, featuring one of Japan’s most popular actors, is about as weird as they come…and that’s before the horses with human faces and ramen on their heads show up.

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Live-action Bakuman trailer released, first glimpse of stars playing against type

On 20 May a trailer for the live-action Bakuman movie was posted online. Before you go groaning at another potentially lame manga/anime adaptation, this one appears to have the goods. Luckily, since the story is mostly grounded in reality it shouldn’t suffer from cheesy effects. Actually, even despite the slice-of-life storyline it does appear to have some decent CGI work.

But more impressive are the films two main characters Moritaka Mashiro and Akito Takagi played by Takeru Sato and Ryunosuke Kamiki respectively. Can Sato pull off the meek charm of Mashiro while Takagi casts aside his more bookish image for Takagi?

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