It is important to understand that there is more to Japanese fiction than what you would read in manga and light novel series like Sword Art Online, Blood Blockade Battlefront, Tokyo Ghoul, Tokyo ESP, Fairy Tail, Bleach, Log Horizon, and many other internationally famous titles.
There are many titles that are just plain text such as the ones written by the late-Satoshi Ito, who went by his pen name “Project Itoh.” Ito died in 2009, but his works continue to live on and three of them are being adapted into full-length anime films hitting theaters later this year.
A special Project Itoh trailer was streamed promoting the three upcoming films titled Genocidal Organ, Harmony, and The Empire of Corpses.
Manglobe will be in charge of producing Genocidal Organ, Studio 4C will be in charge of producing Harmony, and WIT Studio will be in charge of producing The Empire of Corpses.
Genocidal Organ, which came out in 2007, takes place in a post-9/11 world as the “War on Terror” is the primary focus of the story. The chain of events is triggered by a homemade nuclear device that wipes the Eastern European city of Sarajevo off the map.
The world has gone downhill as countries that preach democracy have turned into “surveillance states,” which is a hot button topic in United States politics. Third world countries have to deal with the s—t hitting the fan in the form of growing genocidal attacks.
Earth has been handed down to Hell in a hand-basket.
It becomes a mission for Clavis Shepherd to hunt down American national John Paul, the alleged mysterious culprit behind everything.
Harmony, which came out in 2009, takes place in a utopian society.
But the term is subjective, as the story reveals, because it is a front for a totalitarian regime, which causes the planet to slowly kill itself. Three friends that once formed a suicide pact as children are the only hope of saving this misguided world from imminent death.
Ito passed away before he could seriously work on The Empire of Corpses, but he managed to write a 30-page preface for the story. The surviving members of Ito’s family gave Toh Enjoe, Ito’s close friend, their permission and blessing to finish writing the story.
The Empire of Corpses is a mix of steampunk and cyberpunk that takes place in Victorian Era Europe in the late-19th century. John H. Watson, the same Dr. Watson, is recruited to be a secret agent. The job takes Watson to Afghanistan to investigate a case he learns that Dr. Frankenstein’s original monster is alive.
Watson travels across the world to stop him from unleashing an army of similar creatures onto the Earth.
It is an origin story of John H. Watson before he became the partner to Sherlock Holmes and this is something one would expect to see in Showtime’s Penny Dreadful series.
Project Itoh fans can look forward to the anime film adaptations of these three novels later this year.
