Tatsuya Fujiwara And Ryuhei Matsuda Star In Toshiaki Toyoda's I'M FLASH

It seems safe to say now that Japanese auteur Toshiaki Toyoda - director of Nine Souls and Blue Spring - is well and truly back. After a well publicized brush with the law very nearly ended Toyoda's career prior to the release of The Hanging Garden the director opted to keep an extremely low profile, staying out of the public eye entirely for a couple years before making his first step back not as a film director but as a member of the band Twin Tail. And while he has stepped back into the film world since then both of his subsequent projects - The Blood Of Rebirth and Monster's Club - have intentionally arrived with minimal fanfare, with hardly anyone even knowing they existed prior to their festival premieres.

Not so with the upcoming I'm Flash. Toyoda has an exceptionally high profile cast here with Battle Royale star Tatsuya Fujiwara and Nightmare Detective star Ryuhei Matsuda in the lead roles and they're already actively promoting the film prior to a September 2012 release, with the first stills arriving today.

What's the film actually about? If the article that contained the images says it is beyond the powers of Google Translate to make it clear to me but the casting of Matsuda and Fujiwara - both of whom were, at one time, icons of teen angst - suggests an intriguing thematic progression for Toyoda who built his initial name as the auteur of exactly that sort of teen angst and has, in his later work, explored themes of how those issues translate into adulthood.

Check the images in the gallery below.