COWBOY BEBOP Director Returns With KIDS ON THE SLOPE (SAKAMICHI NO APOLLON)

It has been quite a while since we last saw something significant from Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo director Shinichiro Watanabe. I had the chance to meet the director when we brought him to Toronto as a guest of The Worldwide Short Film Festival to present a screening of the Genius Party anthology, at which time he promised that he was working on a number of projects and that we would be hearing more from him soon. But since that 2007 anthology project, Watanabe has directed only a pair of episodes of television with no new projects of his own arriving until now.

Set to air in April as part of FujiTV's noitaminA lineup, Kids On The Slope (Sakamichi no Apollon) reunites Watanabe with his Cowboy Bebop composer Yoko Kanno in an adaptation of a hugely acclaimed manga.

Nishimi Kaoru has moved from city to city and school to school because of his father's job. So the first day at his new school was just routine for him. Being intellectual and the new transfer student, he has always been seen as an outcast and all Kaoru had to do was bare it until the next time he moved. But things were slightly different this time. First, he started to get close to the class president, Mukae Ritsuko, and, secondly, unlikely as it seemed, grew closer to Kawabuchi Sentaro. Sentaro was infamous for getting into fights, skipping class and was an overall bad boy. Strangely enough, the three of them find common ground in music, namely jazz, and Kaoru finds himself actually enjoying the new town.

The first teaser for Watanabe's latest has arrived online and it's looking good.