Japan's beloved anime/manga Nintama Rantarō (忍たま乱太郎) comes to life, courtesy of prolific director Takashi Miike.

One of Asia's most prolific film-makers well-known for his wide range of film genres from notoriously violent cult films to mainstream family-friendly adaptations from video games and anime, Takashi Miike's incredible versatility once again is at full display, with last year's remake of Eiichi Kudo‘s 1963 samurai epic, Thirteen Assassins, the 3D remake of Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai (一命), which premiered In Competition at this year's Cannes Film Festival, and Ninja Kids!!!, the light-hearted live-action adaptation of Japan's beloved anime/manga Nintama Rantarō (忍たま乱太郎).

First premiered at the New York Asian Film Festival in July, the extremely excitably entitled "Ninja Kids!!!" was released in Japan to generally warm response from critics and movie-goers alike for its notable success in capturing the look and feel of the characters from the original anime/manga. With Warner Bros. reportedly in negotiations on an American remake to the film, the precursor to the wildly popular Naruto might just be on the verge of an international revival of its former popularity.

Hit the jump to check out some of the extremely excitable action-packed sequences one can expect from the film.



Here's the plot synopsis, courtesy of Film Business Asia:

Japan, late Muromachi period, early 16th century AD. Born into a family of low-ranking ninjas, young Rantaro (Kato Seishiro) is sent by his father and mother (Nakamura Shido, Dan Rei) to attend the six-year course at the Ninja Academy run by disciplinarian Yamada Denzo (Terajima Susumu). His fellow classmates include Setsuno Kirimaru (Hayashi Roi), who lost his father in the war and carries a baby sibling on his back, and bushy-eyebrowed Fukutomi Shinbei (Kimura Futa), who's the son of a wealthy merchant family and has a skull like iron. Their homeroom teacher is the kindly Doi Hansuke (Miura Takahiro), and head of the Ninja Girl classes at the school is the mysterious Yamamoto Shina, whose age no one knows and who can appear as either a beautiful young woman (Anne Watanabe) or an old crone (Nakamura Tamao). Yamada's rival is Captain Hieta Happosai (Matsukata Hiroki), who wants to kill him but never succeeds. After going home to his parents' farm for the holidays, Rantaro is joined by Shinbei; but they later go off and stay with teacher Doi, who lives a spartan life and finds himself invaded by Rantaro's classmates. One day, some Usetake ninjas arrive at the house of flamboyant hairdresser Saito Yukitaka (Kaga Takeshi) and his son Takamura (Mizoguchi Takuya), a senior pupil at the Ninja Academy, in order to kill both of them. Yukitaka and Takamura used to belong to the Usetake clan, but Rantaro and his friends aim to save them — a contest that climaxes with a race to run a bell on a mountain.

And here are some of the selected posters and still from the film.



The original anime.