With Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro took everything that was great about Saturday morning breakfast cartoons – Colourful robots! Gnarly monsters! Ludicrously-named characters! – and channelled it into a rock-‘em-sock-‘em big-screen blockbuster. It’s only fitting, then, that the kaiju saga is set to continue in animated form with an original Netflix anime series.
The streaming service announced several new projects at its See What’s Next: Asia event, including a seemingly-untitled Pacific Rim show. The episodic series will follow ‘an idealistic teenage boy and his naïve younger sister’ who are on the search for their missing parents, venturing out into the dangerous world in an abandoned Jaeger. The series comes for Legendary Entertainment, with Legendary also producing both del Toro’s original 2013 Pacific Rim and its 2018 sequel Pacific Rim: Uprising.
That’s not the only familiar project getting a new anime project from Netflix – the streaming service is forging ahead with an animated feature film in the universe of Altered Carbon, the body-hopping cyberpunk show that began in live-action form earlier in 2018. The film is said to ‘explore new elements of the story mythology’, and comes from writer Dai Sato, who previous was a writer and worked on the art department for Cowboy Bebop.
It’s not the first time Netflix has delved into anime – the service is behind Devilman Crybaby, Sanrio series Aggretsuko, and the anime-inspired Castlevania and Neo Yokio.
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