Warner Bros Japan has confirmed that Sota Aoyama will return to play Tōta Matsuda in the latest live-action Death Note movie, due for release in October 2016.

This will be considered fantastic news by many fans, for whom he IS Matsuda in any live-action capacity.

Aoyama last wore the face of that young, irrepressibly enthusiastic and famously foolish police officer ten years ago, featuring in the cast of Death Note (2006) and Death Note: The Last Name (2006). 

The role also earned him a place in the spotlight starring in Spin-Off Matsuda - a movie short, little known outside Japan, released in conjunction with L: Change the World (2008).

It seems that this live action Matsuda is a glutton for punishment, as a decade on from all that trauma, he's pictured apparently back on the Kira Task Force taking on another six Death Note owners scattered across the world.

Though his presence could also be in a mere advisory/consultancy role.  It's impossible to tell from a couple of still photographs, issued as teasers without context (see below).

The news that Sota Aoyama is reprising his Death Note acting role comes on the back of two other announcements, similarly regarding actors familiar from the first movies.  Erika Toda is also on her way back - signing up to return to her role as Misa Amane - while Shidou Nakamura will be voicing the newer, darker, scarier CGI shingami Ryuk. All in glorious continuity of those earlier, decade old Death Note films.

Death Gods aside, Matsuda constitutes the only remaining person privy to insider information about Kira the first time around and able to share it now. It can be presumed that Ryuk won't be taking sides, finding it more amusing (and diverting) to observe the action as entertainment from the sidelines.

While in the movie timeline, Misa's memories of the whole Kira case (give or take her love for Light Yagami) were wiped at the end of the last main instalment.

A couple of officially released stills from the Japanese live action Death Note 2016 have been circulating about the internet.

They depict actor Masahiro Higashide in his role as Tsukuru Mishima, main investigator with the Death Note Counter Measure Headquarters Special Team.

This was a sub-set of the Japanese law enforcement authority that was created by Soichiro Yagami in the aftermath of events shown in the previous movies.  Following his death - sometime during the intervening years - Mishima took the lead.

His character is known as such an expert on all things related to Shinigami notebooks that his nickname on the force is Death Note Otaku.  How many of us have previously claimed that particular accolade as our own? 

While we have no context for the pictures, we do know that six Death Notes will be falling on the Earth in this next movie.  Presumably that accounts for the grim expression worn by their chief researcher, investigator and all round know it all.

Perhaps in the image below, he has found some kind of lead revealing the enormity of the task ahead, or else demonstrating the horrors that one or more Death Note owners are set to unleash.

Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata have intimated that this will be the darkest Death Note story yet, one which puts firmly in the shade that surrounding Light Yagami.

Death Note 2016 (working title) will be released in Japanese theatres on October 29th 2016, just in time for Halloween.  There is no word as yet about the live-action movie being subbed or dubbed for foreign audiences. Though we can assume that will be a thing, given time and patience.

Any thoughts on it at this juncture?


Images courtesy of Warner Brothers Japan.

 The recently announced stars of Death Note 2016 - Sōsuke Ikematsu, Masahiro Higashide and Masaki Suda - have been commenting on their new roles.

Masahiro, who is playing Death Note researcher and investigator Tsukuru Mishima, notes that he's grown up knowing this story.  Therefore it's difficult not to be influenced by what has gone before; nor to avoid the pressure in getting it right.

He views the latest story as a three-way, intertwined battle between geniuses. He is enjoying making the movie and hopes that we enjoy watching it, including those discovering the story for the first time now.

'New L' Sōsuke - aka Ryūzaki - is also feeling the pressure: to live up to the legacy left by Ken'ichi Matsuyama in the earlier movies. He feels excited about filming and notes that every day the cast are directed in exceeding the standard of the day before.

This new Death Note story, he feels, contains the central message that human beings are weak and foolish creatures.

Masaki equally remembers when he was in the audience watching earlier Death Note live-action films. That makes it all the more thrilling to be starring in one now.

He sees in his own legacy a hint of Mello and Near in the original manga, insofar as his cyber-terrorist Kira worshipper character Yūgi Shion - plus the parts played by the other two - represent the successors, heirs or children of Light and L.  This is the movie equivalent of a Death Note second arc.

He hopes that their 'second half' story will surpass expectations laid down by the first wave of Japanese live-action Death Note movies ten years ago.

Personally they would have had my (tentative) vote straight out, if they'd just HAD Mello in one of these live-action movies.  And I don't mean disguised as a young schoolgirl.  We're all looking at you, L: Change the World and Maki.

Also known as L mark 2 (or should that be mark 4, seeing as we have to account for Near, Mello and Matt), Ryūzaki is a world famous, top-class detective lured into the spotlight by the emergence of no less than SIX Death Notes.

Shinigami are getting very careless these days. Or bored.

However, Ryūzaki isn't merely a Wammy kid grown old enough to get chucked onto the front line.  Like all the rest.  He's legitimately an heir of L, bloodline, genes and all.

No, this isn't a secret love-child that we've uncovered here. It's much worse than that.

Apparently L left behind a sample of his DNA, so that he might be cloned, into a global detective, called Ryūzaki.

This new Death Note character will be played by Sōsuke Ikematsu, known to the cinema going public as Higen in The Last Samurai and Kazuhiko Shingai in MOZU.

Ryūzaki is aided and abetted in this endeavour - and no doubt given the heads up re a sudden epidemic of Death Notes - by police researcher and archivist Tsukuru Mishima.

The spiritual (as opposed to genealogical) successor to Soichiro Yagami and his crew, Tsukuru Mishima specializes in artefacts from the Kira case that went before.

Ten years previously to be precise.

Therefore the investigator is well placed to recognize the reality of each new notebook dropped by a Death God in various locations around the globe.  He becomes the go to expert for all other authorities within stricken nations.

Or more likely, he does whatever Ryūzaki ends up directing him to do.

Tsukuru Mishima will be played by Masahiro Higashide.  The actor's other roles include Hideo Shimada in Parasyte and Kō Mabuchi in Ao Haru's Ride.

And what's a Death Note story without a Kira?  Or in this instance, a Kira worshipping cyber-terrorist and/or hacker named Yūgi Shion.

Me and popular media don't often agree upon what constitutes a 'cyber-terrorist', but this time we may be in accord. 

Yūgi Shion uses his computing skills and internet presence to not only locate all fallen shinigami notebooks, but also has some role in co-ordinating events.

He may or not be the individual already announced - in a snippet from the Death Note 2016 movie trailer - as being cloned from a shard of Light Yagami DNA.  Though how anyone got that is anybody's guess, particularly as they had to get through Near to reach the corpse.

Unless it was Near.  In fact, where is Near in this movie plotline now?!

Oh.  Movies.  He's an infant maths genius just entering Wammy's House as L was killed.  Not manga instigator of the Yellow Box pwning at all.  He should be just about old enough to be, well, Ryūzaki by now. Because the new L isn't a ten year old either.

Back to the actual plot - Masaki Suda will be playing Yūgi Shion; an actor also known as Karma Akabane in Assassination Classroom and Kuranosuke Koibuchi in Kuragehime.