Parents beware! Takashi Miike is after your kids!

For some, Takashi Miike is kind of becoming like your favorite local indie band. They had a fresh sound. You saw them play for the first time in an elementary school gym with shitty acoustics and bathroom urinals that only came up to you knees. You would drive for hours to see them play in small town curling rinks. You followed them as they started to get into shows and clubs. Then other people started to take notice and the crowds got bigger, the venues larger and guys with lanyards and VIP passes were ushering them into the dark corners of the clubs and you no longer heard their songs on AM but FM radio. Bastards! They've sold out! They've gone mainstream! They're no longer that little indie band but are now talking to boys wearing makeup on MuchMusic. 

Dicks!

The more Takashi Miike enters into mainstream film the more that the fans old lament the old days of Miike, that maverick director who churned out a film every two months, films that pushed the limits like Audition, Ichi the Killer and Gozu. Once the grand master of V Cinema Miike has been dabbling in the mainstream now with films like Yatterman and that doesn't seem to bode well with some longtime Miike fans. Well, get out your sackcloths, rub your hair with ashes and gnash your teeth cause he's doing it again.

This time around Miike with be adapting the anime-from-manga Nintama Rantaro... The anime is based on Soubee Amako's Rakudai Ninja Rantarō ninja gag manga (Asahi Comics) about the adventures of Rantarō and other ninja apprentices at an elite ninjutsu academy. The story is set in Japan during the tumultuous Sengoku Jidai (Era of the Warring States). As first-graders, Rantarō and his ninja-in-training friends are called "Nintama" -- a contraction of the words "ninja" and "tamago" ("egg"). Eight year-old actor Seishirō Katō has landed the lead. The little booger has pretty much been acting since leaving his mother's womb. 

So yeah. Miike's doing another anime adaption and it would seem he's aiming for an even younger crowd this time. Maybe we should start calling him Ojīchan Miike [Grandpa Miike... I think]? Or, perhaps, he's realized that this current crowd of Miike devotees cannot be corrupted any further and he's going back to nurture a new fan base. Get 'em while they're young. And when they're at their most impressionable stage when life sucks, school sucks, parents suck, job sucks, girlfriend/boyfriend sucks [or doesn't?] then Miike comes in with the southpaw and he goes back to his maverick ways and film titles will once again emerge out of bodily fluids. 

All we need is a little patience.