Kazuhiro Yamaji Joins Madhouse’s ghost/end of night as a Man Who Hates the World. His Confession: He Envied It a Little

Bandai Namco Filmworks has released the full trailer for ghost/end of night, Shingo Natsume’s first original feature at Madhouse, and named five more voices. Kazuhiro Yamaji, the long-time Japanese voice of Jason Statham, plays a homeless old man who hates the world. His comment on the role ends with a joke about not having to work.

The new trailer and a second key visual went out on Tuesday in Japan, along with five additions to the cast. Takeo Ōtsuka plays Bora, the heroine’s predecessor, who loves beautiful things. Kazuhiro Yamaji is Ahab, a homeless old man who is furious with the world. Yūki Shin plays Structure, a man with the same special privileges as the heroine. Hina Yōmiya is Mike, a girl frightened of being sorted, and Atsumi Tanezaki voices Masu’s son.

They join the two leads announced in August. Mayu Hotta voices Nike, a gifted 15-year-old who already holds privileges but can’t stand the world that gave them to her, and Issey Takahashi plays Masu, a man carrying a deep loss. The film is set in a near future where human work is no longer needed, and everyone is “sorted” at 18 into the people the world needs and the people it doesn’t. It opens in Japanese cinemas on 11 February 2027.

Movie Walker Press reports that the trailer opens on Nike’s lines “Stupid people don’t have to work” and “fakes that don’t make anything with their own hands.” Pia picks out two more you can hear in it: “I’m not the one who’s wrong” and “I’ll drop a bomb on the idiots’ heads.” The voices start straight away, under hitsujibungaku’s new theme song “life.”

Hear the voices: the main trailer for ghost/end of night, in Japanese. Video: Bandai Namco Filmworks, on YouTube

Yamaji’s world without work

Kazuhiro Yamaji is a stage actor with the Seinenza Theater Company, and Japanese audiences have heard him for decades in dubbed Hollywood films. He has been Jason Statham’s Japanese voice since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and he dubbed Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine. Game players know him as Cid Highwind in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.

Ahab, voiced by Kazuhiro Yamaji. Image: © ghost production committee

His comment on Ahab, released with the trailer, reads like a short poem. “A world where you don’t have to work anymore. A world where you don’t have to think,” he wrote. “It’s a life sentence, standing still in a square walled in on all four sides. Agoraphobia. And out of it appears a feeling nobody could explain… ghost.”

Then he turns the role on himself. “Ahab reminds me of who I was when I was young, full of an anger I couldn’t put into words (which came from weakness),” Yamaji wrote. “Watching it, I found it hard to breathe.” And the punchline: “I can’t hide the fact that I felt a little envious, though: ‘What?! You don’t have to work?!'”

It’s a very actor’s answer. A man who has spent a career working on stage and in dubbing booths gets cast in a world where nobody needs to work, and his first honest reaction is that it sounds rather nice.

Four more voices, four routes into the booth

Takeo Ōtsuka shared the Best New Actor prize at the 14th Seiyu Awards in 2020 and has since voiced Aqua in Oshi no Ko and Jinshi in The Apothecary Diaries. He calls the film one that shows “something everyone carries, or may have carried, in a way that’s both dreamlike and real,” and asks: “Is it the characters you see yourself in, or society, or the words and sounds?”

Yūki Shin, who starred as Takemichi Hanagaki in Tokyo Revengers, says the quiet role stretched him. “Playing the mysterious Structure was a personal challenge, but I think I managed to play him delicately, so I’d be glad if you keep an eye on him,” he told Movie Walker Press.

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Hina Yōmiya, of Aoni Production, voiced Shinju Inui in My Dress-Up Darling and Anna Yamada in The Dangers in My Heart. Her comment goes back to the recording session itself. “I feel very lucky that I got to perform while feeling the atmosphere of this film right there at the recording,” she said, adding that she kept getting drawn in by “the beautiful pictures, the wonderful music, the delicately drawn points of view and movement, and their changes of pace.”

Atsumi Tanezaki, the voice of Anya in Spy x Family and of Frieren, wrote the most personal note of the five. “I’ve always had a habit of going on thinking about things I don’t need to think about. I’ve wanted to stop for ages, but I can’t,” she said. “But watching this film, I felt I understood a little of why I keep doing it. That’s my own faint light, the one I found inside the film.”

Two leads from live action, and a director’s first original film

Both leads come mainly from live action, a common choice for Japanese animated features. Mayu Hotta voiced the lead in the 2022 film Blue Thermal. Issey Takahashi has a longer voice history than most screen actors: he was Seiji Amasawa in Studio Ghibli’s Whisper of the Heart in 1995, Snufkin in Moominvalley, and Ultraman in Shin Ultraman. In October the film also added three well known voice actors, Kenjiro Tsuda, Hiroki Yasumoto and Hiroshi Kamiya, to its supporting cast, according to Pia.

Masu, voiced by Issey Takahashi. Image: © ghost production committee

Shingo Natsume has directed Space Dandy, the first season of One-Punch Man, ACCA: 13-Territory Inspection Dept. and Sonny Boy, but this is his first original feature film. He also wrote the script. In August, Anime News Network reported, he said he was aiming for “a work that could be called fictional but is in tune with our current time and seeks realism.”

Rock band hitsujibungaku wrote six songs for the film, including the theme “life” and the insert song “Sugar,” and Ōzora Kimishima composed the score. Natsume Ono, the manga artist behind ACCA, created the original character designs, adapted for animation by Norifumi Kugai. The film has already screened at Annecy, the Tokyo International Film Festival, Busan and Variety’s Animation is Film festival.

A frame from the main trailer. Image: © ghost production committee

Tickets, a novel and a February opening

The release builds slowly towards February. A novel by Akimaro Mori comes out under the Kadokawa Bunko imprint on 25 January 2027, the first collected volume of the manga in Young Ace follows on 4 February, and the theme song CD arrives on 10 February, the day before the film opens. Advance tickets are already selling in Japan, and two more ways to buy them arrive this month.

No English dub or international release has been announced yet. For now the voices are all Japanese, and on the strength of this trailer, Yamaji’s old man may be the one people quote on the way out.

Sources: Bandai Namco Filmworks, official trailer and cast comments; Pia; Movie Walker Press; Anime News Network; Anitrendz. Quotations from Japanese are translated by Voice Over Herald. Images: © ghost production committee.

Lee este artículo en español: Kazuhiro Yamaji se suma a ghost/end of night, de Madhouse, como un hombre que odia al mundo. Confiesa que lo envidió un poco

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