Yasuhiro Irie, the director of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood and Scorching Ping Pong Girls, has released a short anime musical titled Halloween Pajama on his YouTube channel.
Aside from directing, Irie also wrote and storyboarded Halloween Pajama. Additionally, he handled the key animation, backgrounds, color design, and compositing. Tomomi Ozaki (Le Chevalier D’Eon character designer) is credited with design assistance, while MONACA produced the music with Kuniyuki Takahashi (My Teen Romantic Comedy SNAFU Climax co-composer) composing.
The Halloween Pajama cast includes Juri Ihata as Ran Jakou, Yoshino Aoyama as Tama, Saki Nakae as Sensei, and Kenichiro Himi as the Man in the Car.
(Note: The short has some NSFW content from 4:33 to 4:41)
Halloween Pajama was originally a manga that Irie started work on in 2013. He produced five volumes (totalling roughly 400 pages) and released promotional videos on YouTube. The manga was sold at Comiket and Comitia.
In 2017, Irie attempted to crowdfund a 20-minute anime adaptation of the Halloween Pajama in Seattle: The Dream Catcher part of the series on Kickstarter but failed. That anime would also have been a musical.
That same year, there was a successful crowdfunding campaign to translate Halloween Pajama into English. The Kickstarter page describes the premise as:
When 10 year old Jackie O’Wisp dreams, she encounters the strangest type of people. She comes to find out that those people are wandering ghosts, still with attachments to this world who can’t go to heaven. In her alter ego, Halloween Pajama, she helps see the ghosts on their way to heaven. Jackie O’Wisp eventually learns that the devil exists in the depths of the dream world, a devil which she will confront. But will she be able to overcome it?
The manga originally had both Japanese and Italian text, with the latter provided by an Italian friend of Irie’s. Irie explained on Kickstarter, “The story goes back to 2010 when I visited Italy for an anime convention. I was completely taken by the seafood and the white wine, so I began learning Italian for the return visit. As my textbook, I wanted to read Halloween Pajama in Italian.”
2017 also saw a crowdfunding campaign on Campfire, meant to fund a new publication of Halloween Pajama for Summer Comiket, that raised 217,501 yen (~US$1,460), surpassing its 80,000 (~US$538) yen goal. In addition, a Kindle version of the manga was released on Amazon in December that year.
Prior to the Halloween Pajama anime’s release, Irie featured musical elements in his previous directorial effort Healer Girl, which aired from April to June this year.
Source: @IRICOMIX
