The artists gathered at last month's Tokyo premiere of "Sturgill Simpson Presents Sound & Fury" were as eclectic as the film they'd all made: a 41-minute anime music video set to an entire album by the Grammy-winning Sturgill Simpson, a country music singer-songwriter from Kentucky.
After the screening, delivered in 7.1 surround sound so rich it enveloped like an aural duvet, Japanese and American anime luminaries including Koji Morimoto ("Akira"), Michael Arias ("Tekkonkinkreet"), Masaru Matsumoto ("Appleseed Alpha"), Shinji Takagi ("Steamboy"), Arthell Isom ("Strike Witches") and Henry Thurlow ("Tokyo Ghoul") stood shoulder-to-shoulder beneath projected images of scenes from the omnibus project. Standing tallest among them was a squinting Simpson, just in from the U.S. and still, he confessed, addled by jet lag.
But the mash-up doesn't end there. The film's overarching storyline was inspired by Akira Kurosawa's 1961 samurai classic "Yojimbo," about a ronin warrior for hire. Junpei Mizusaki and his CG studio Kamikaze Douga of "Batman Ninja" fame directed it, with character designs by "Afro Samurai" manga artist Takashi (Bob) Okazaki.