There aren’t enough words in my limited vocabulary to describe how good Blade Runner 2049 is, disappointing box office totals be damned.
But even more than the movie itself, I love the Blade Runner 2049 prequel short films that were released before the movie, especially the Shinichiro Watanabe-directed anime opus, Blade Runner Black Out 2022.
Some suits clearly watched Watanabe’s short and thought “there’s something there” because Variety is reporting that he will help develop a new Blade Runner anime series.
If this is some sort of wild Spike Spiegel dream, I definitely don’t want to wake up because this is a sure-fire shot as far as I’m concerned.
Bang.
Titled Blade Runner – Black Lotus, the series is a partnership between Adult Swim and Crunchyroll, and will consist of 13 half-hour episodes and will be set in 2032, which places it before 2049 but after Watanabe’s anime short.
Directors for the series will be Shinji Aramaki and Kenji Kamiyama, who recently directed the upcoming Ghost in the Shell series reboot. But perhaps most importantly, Watanabe will serve as creative producer for Black Lotus, which will undoubtedly give fans confidence in the project since the guy is only one of the most influential anime directors of all time.
Plot details are being under tighter wraps than the identity of Rick Deckard’s child in 2049, but we do know that the series will include “some established characters from the Blade Runner” universe.
Sweet, maybe that means we can see more of Dave Bautista as the sympathetic replicant Sapper Morton because the bloke didn’t receive enough screen time in 2049.
As for when and where we can watch all this Blade Runner anime goodness, no release date has been revealed yet but it will hit Adult Swim (in the form of English-dubbed episodes) and Crunchyroll (for worldwide streaming stuff) at some point.
With Watanabe helping to make a critically-acclaimed live-action American franchise into anime just as his most acclaimed anime work, Cowboy Bebop, is being turned into a live-action TV series on Netlfix, there’s some kind of weird poetry to all of this.
Hopefully all this poetry will result in some great content because everything is screaming “winner” on paper right now.