Bizarrely it's only on YouTube and not the film's official site - which means it's a pretty crappy video format particularly for such a strongly visual director - but the full theatrical trailer for Ghost in the Shell director Mamoru Oshii's new feature Sky Crawlers has now arrived. I've talked to a few people who have seen the first fifteen minutes of this at a private Tokyo exhibition recently and all of them say it is absolutely stunning work, one going so far to say that the flight sequences out-do the flight work in the films of Hayao Miyazaki, which is high praise indeed. You'll find the trailer below the break.
Interesting -- Any idea if the Japanese Version sold on YesAsia.com hosts English subtitles? Or if it can be sold to North America through a different vendor?
RAF - I think the DVD you're probably talking about is one of the countdown teaser DVDs they're releasing in advance of the theatrical premiere in August. (It looks like they're doing three of them, based on how they're numbered.) I'm pretty sure they don't have English subs.
I doubt the phrasing at the end of the trailer is meant to be continuous. The particular phrase is left open intentionally, and probably left so in the movie itself. So the last dialogue bit would be "I finally get it, the meaning of kiridore, the meaning of meeting you. It's ..." and then we get the title of the movie after a slight pause.
I'm almost sure there's a scene like this in the end of the movie:
The girl in the trailer reads a letter by the main character.
*trailer end voiceover bit begins*
We see an epic scene as he gets blown to bits in his plane, while the voiceover from the trailer continues in the background.
Girl cries and realizes the answer to life, the universe and everything is 42.
About the word kiridore: it's not an actual word, just something cooked up for this film. From what I quickly gathered kiridore are some kind of artificially created adolescent humans that don't age and are made to do combat in those planes. Probably a look at the 'cherry blossom'-ideal of living a short, but beautiful life only to wither away in your prime. So basically a pretty typical Oshii-theme with non-humans pondering what their place in the world is.
I think Fabool has the right idea according to the meager plot details that are out there. The word is actually "Kirudore", which appears to be a combination of "kill" and "children" (something like "Killdren").
Cheers fabool. I know it's not supposed to flow on, I guess I just got caught up in the monologue :P
Going back and watching the trailer again, I feel stupid for missing all that kirudore stuff! You might just be correct about that ending—I know I've seen that play more than a few times now... and now I'm even more convinced of it probably being just a fraction more mainstream than, say, Angel's Egg.
Looks beautiful. Is Warner Bros. distributing this in the US as well as Japan? That could be good or it could be bad...
Nothing in the trailer that looks to out do Porco Rosso, but that may be a hand drawn vs. CG bias.
The trailer went up on the website today. Go view for better quality.