Beauty guru, Michelle Phan, will take on her first-ever anime role in the upcoming series Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre.
As detailed in a post on the Netflix Anime Twitter page, Phan will play the role of the character Mari in Episode 4 of Junji Ito Maniac. Mari is a supporting character in “The Sandman’s Lair,” a tale about a man terrified of sleeping because he believes a person from his dreams is trying to escape into reality. Phan is the first confirmed cast member of Junji Ito Maniac’s English dub.
Michelle Phan’s Multifaceted Success
Michelle Phan is one of Youtube’s most iconic stars in the beauty and vlogging scene. Since starting her channel in 2006, she has amassed a huge audience of over 8.7 million subscribers, giving her content over 1 billion views. In addition to her YouTube career, Phan is also the owner and founder of EM Cosmetics, which she successfully relaunched after its initial failure in 2015. Although Phan has never been cast in an anime before, she has taken minor voice acting roles in the past, playing Jessica Jones from the video game Marvel Avengers Academy in 2016 and Blackberry Cookie from the mobile game Cookie Run: Kingdom in 2021.
In Junji Ito’s tale, “The Sandman’s Lair,” Phan’s character Mari is a close friend of the story’s main protagonist, Yuji. Despite Yuji’s insistence that a malignant force in his dreams is trying to swap places with him in the real world, Mari tries to console and help him throughout the story. As time passes, Mari takes increasingly drastic measures to reassure Yuji, such as preventing him from sleeping or binding his wrists and ankles at night. In the Japanese version, Junko Oka, who has played minor character roles in numerous anime series, including Jujutsu Kaisen and The Ancient Magus’ Bride, plays Mari.
Junji Ito Maniac is an anthology series that will adapt 20 select stories from renowned horror icon Junji Ito. Some series’ highlights include “Tomie: Photo” a tale about a mysterious young woman that seeks revenge against a group of obsessive photographers from her school, “The Hanging Balloons,” which is about a small town that is plagued with visions of floating, decapitated heads, “Unendurable Labyrinth” which is about a pair of friends that discover an insane religious cult living in an underground maze, and “Library of Illusions,” a tale about a man who becomes completely obsessed with his family’s large book collection.
Junji Ito Maniac: Japanese Tales of the Macabre will launch on Netflix on Jan. 19.
Source: Twitter
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