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Baseball Anime Battery's 2nd Promo Reveals Additional Cast

The official YouTube channel for Fuji TV's Noitamina block began streaming a second promotional video for the anime of Atsuko Asano's Battery baseball novels on Friday. The video reveals four additional cast members.

The newly-announced cast members include (from left to right):

• Yūi Fujimaki as Seiha Harada, Takumi's younger brother
• Yūki Ono as Shūgo Kadowaki, a serious-minded cleanup hitter on the champion middle school team
• Ryōhei Kimura as Shunji Mizugaki, a shortstop on the champion middle school team
• Yuichiro Umehara as Kazuki Kaionji, captain, cleanup hitter, and shortstop for the Shinden Higashi Middle School baseball club

As previously announced, the anime will star:

Kōki Uchiyama (Nisekoi's Raku Ichijō) as Takumi Harada, a pitcher and the story's protagonist

Tasuku Hatanaka (Ushio & Tora's Ushio) as Gō Nagakura, a catcher and the story's other protagonist

The anime will premiere on Noitamina in July.

Tomomi Mochizuki (House of Five Leaves, Pupa) is both directing and scripting the upcoming anime adaptation at Zero-G (Hyper Speed GranDoll, Shadow Skill, MD Geist II - Death Force). Takako Shimura (Wandering Son , Sweet Blue Flowers original creator) is in charge of the original character designs, Hideoki Kusama (Sket Dance , Mononoke animation director) is adapting those designs for animation and is also serving as chief animation director, and Akira Senju (Valvrave the Liberator , Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood ) is composing the music.

Asano's novels revolve around Takumi Harada, a young man who moves to a mountain town in Okayama Prefecture during the spring break before he enters middle school due to his father's job transfer. Takumi is a pitcher, and after he moves he loses faith in his own talent, when suddenly his classmate Gō Nagakura appears in front of him. Gō has a strong desire to form a "battery" (a combination of a pitcher and catcher) with Takumi.

Kyouiku Gageki originally released the novel series in hardback between 1996 and 2005, and Kadokawa re-released the series in paperback in 2003-2007. A live-action film adaptation opened in Japan in 2007, and a live-action television series aired in 2008. Asano's No. 6 novels also inspired a manga and a television anime adaptation.

Shimura will begin a new manga adaptation Kadokawa's Monthly Comic Beam on June 11. The novels already received an eight-volume manga adaptation by Chikage Yuniwa between 2005-2010. The manga then went on hiatus, but Yuniwa resumed the manga in Kadokawa's Asuka magazine in the August issue last year.

Shimura is best known for her Wandering Son and Aoi Hana manga, both of which have inspired television anime series adaptations in 2011 and 2009 respectively. She also drew the original character designs for the Aldnoah.Zero anime. Shimura launched a new manga series in Libre Publishing's Be x Boy magazine on May 6. Fantagraphics is releasing volumes of her Wandering Son manga in North America.