The Vermillion Mask's Premiere Is a Truncated But Interesting Affair

A mask salesman. Masks with magical powers. One of them is very evil, apparently. And there's a gang of misfits who try to steal said mask. No, I'm actually not talking about Zelda: Majora's Mask here, although it sounds like it. At its Otakon premiere panel, one audience member even asked if it was inspired by Jim Carrey's The Mask. A story about magical masks is nothing new in the fiction department, but I was still curious to see how The Vermillion Mask's first episode would spin this premise, and these familiar beats, around.

...which is what I would have said if I got to see more of the episode at Otakon. I only got to see the first few minutes before it just stopped so the anime staff could do their Q&A.

What I did get to see though was a promising enough introduction that pretty much tics off every box I expected it to. The mask salesman Peru unsuccessfully tries to sell his masks on the city streets before some kids come by to steal one that's locked away in an ominous-looking box. That's about it. The animation's nothing fancy, although I can get behind its foggy color scheme.

That being said, director Tesukai Watanabe and seiyuu Kazuki Ura had plenty to say when it came time for their Q&A. One of the things that interested them in adapting this anime was its underground status. “In Japan, you have the three big manga mags, and there's a lot of great works that exist outside of them,” Watanabe said. “The Vermilion Mask is one of those great works not a lot of people know about, and I wanted more people to know it.”

Despite the fact that Watanabe had worked with Ura on Blue Lock, it wasn't Ura's performance of Yoichi Isagi that became the inspiration for The Vermillion Mask's Mok. In fact, Watanabe revealed that all he needed was to go out to dinner with Ura and hear him speak in his regular voice. “When he's normal,” Watanabe said, “when he's being himself, that felt like the voice of Moku for me. After reciting a few lines of dialogue, Ura went on to discuss what it was like to voice the smoke-masked Mok. “He smokes, I don't,” Ura said. “I had to do a lot of retakes.”

Regarding Ura's favorite part about voice acting Mok, he said that “the fun part is that he's very alive and easygoing, but his passionate side is what really excites me. That's one of the reasons why I like voicing him, I like seeing that gap.”

I left this panel still not knowing too much about The Vermillion Mask's anime. But considering everything, the scraps of it that I've gotten left me somewhat curious. So long as it's consistent with its premise, I've got nothing against some popcorn-y mask-on-mask action.