In January 2021, Japan will release an animated film adaptation of Iori Miyazawa's science fiction book Otherside Picnic, inspired by the story of the Soviet writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky "Roadside Picnic".
The project is produced by Liden Films and FelixFilm studios.
The director's chair is Takuya Sato, who has worked on films such as Steins Gate and Say: I Love You.
He is also working on the script for the film.
There will be 12 episodes in total.
The events of the series will unfold in Tokyo.
In the story, the main character Soravo finds an entrance to the other world - an unusual quiet place full of ancient ruins.
There, the girl is faced with many anomalies.
She almost dies after meeting with a strange mystical creature, when Toriko, a young stalker, comes to her aid, mining and selling artifacts found in this zone for big money.
Together, the girls will try to uncover the secrets of this other world and survive in it.
Light novel (that is, a novel with a lot of dialogues and illustrations) by Iori Miyazawa's Otherside Picnic was published in Japan in 2017, and in 2019 it appeared in English.
To date, four books have been released in the series.
From February 2018 to March 2020, Otherside Picnic was published in manga format in Square Enix magazine.
Square Enix Manga & Books is expected to release the work separately in May 2021.
As the writer Lau Griffin notes, despite the similarity to the cult story of the Strugatsky brothers, the Otherside Picnic book is interesting as an independent work.
“Although Miyazawa describes the exploration of a dangerous 'zone' full of strange monsters and anomalies that go against the laws of physics, the adventures in his book are based on real-life ghost stories found on the Internet.
Compared to the aliens of the Strugatsky brothers and the paranormal phenomena from Stalker, the other world that the protagonists Soravo and Toriko are exploring is something deeper and less explicable, "Griffin notes in his publication on The Great Surf.
© Still from the film "Stalker" (1979)
The action science fiction novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky "Roadside Picnic" takes place in the XX century.
It is assumed that representatives of extraterrestrial civilization visit the Earth several years before the described events.
As a result, zones that are dangerous for people appear on the planet: phenomena occur there that run counter to the laws of physics.
In addition, many mysterious artifacts can be found in fenced areas, both useful and extremely dangerous.
The protagonist of the story, stalker Redrick Schuhart, seeks and sells these artifacts.
The story was first published in 1972.
She gained wide popularity far beyond the borders of the Union and was published in at least twenty countries.
The book has been filmed several times.
The most successful adaptation was Andrei Tarkovsky's film "Stalker" with Alexander Kaidanovsky in the title role.
The plot of the tape was significantly different from the one described in the story, although the Strugatskys themselves worked on its script together with Tarkovsky.
Other film adaptations include the 1977 Czechoslovak film A Visit from Space and the Zona feature film by Finnish companies Pilman Radiant Pictures and Marmont Entertainment.
In 2015, it became known about the plans of WGN America to shoot a series based on the story of the Strugatskys.
It was slated to be directed by Alan Taylor (Terminator Genisys, Game of Thrones, Mad Men) and starred by Matthew Goode (Match Point, The Lonely Man).
However, in 2017, the studio abandoned the project.