Director Takashi Miike has built up a cult following around the world over the past two decades with an oeuvre of horror movies, often featuring extreme violence.

So it might appear at first that his latest release, a family-friendly film about a group of teenage girls who transform into a frilly-dressed superhero troupe, is a strange turn for a man once dubbed by Time magazine as a "master of the grotesque."

But the 60-year-old director of fright classics such as "Audition" (1999) and "Ichi the Killer" (2001) disagrees.