Kihachi Okamoto's 'Japans Longest Day' (1976) and 'Rainbow Kids' (1991) both for R1 USA DVD Release.

Losing track now of how many Okamoto films have piled out on DVD in the USA. It's quite a few, 'Kill!' and 'Sword of Doom' from Criterion, 'Red Lion' and 'Samurai Assasin' from AnimEigo, 'Zatoichi Versus Yojimbo'?

The point is, despite a large amount of titles there's still relatively little focussed attention on him as a figure, at least I don't get a sense I know much directly about the man and the key characteristics of his work (even though I have the very large majority of those listed here) so here comes another opportunity to take a look at a couple more different films, something apart from the Samurai stuff I've seen to date.

We've two more coming then - 'Japans Longest Day' from AnimEigo (features Toshiro Mifune of course), is Okamoto's 'most famous film' or 'Japans most famous war film' according to many and sounds like (...haven't seen it yet) a lengthy WWII epic about the day Japans part in the war ended.

Then there's a different side to the man's work in the form of the relatively late 'Rainbow Kids' (aka 'Daiyukai', a satire / comedy which features an old lady who is kidnapped and manages to take control of the situation - sounds like great fun), which apart from the film itself, is of interest because it's one of half a dozen Geneon releases for America : how many live action Geneon releases have there been? New trend? Well, they're going to do some relatively unusual stuff to start but we could see some more frequent releases of new titles? Maybe?...

MidnightEye Tribute to Kihachi Okamoto from 2005.
'Rainbow Kids' by Kihachi Okamoto is release August 29th 2006 on R1 USA DVD from Geneon USA.
'Japans Longest Day' by Kihachi Okamoto is released September 5th 2006 on R1 USA DVD from AnimEigo.