Netflix has been all about anime over the last few years, adding a bunch of well-known anime hits like Fullmetal Alchemist alongside purposefully obscure originals like Neo Yokio, and the streaming service clearly has no intention of ditching its anime fans. According to Deadline, Netflix has just announced five new anime projects, some of which are pretty high-profile. The first and biggest one is Pacific Rim, an anime series based on the movie series about “an idealistic teenage boy and his naïve younger sister” who find an abandoned Jaeger and go on an adventure to find their missing parents. There are clearly some well-worn anime tropes at work here, but it’s not like there’s anyone out there who could pilot a giant robot better than a teenager with literally no training. That’s what teenagers are best at.
Beyond that, Netflix is also developing an anime spin-off of its live-action sci-fi series Altered Carbon, with the Deadline story saying it “will explore new elements of the story mythology.” Considering it already had some wild mythology, with people swapping brains into new bodies and all that, expanding on the series seems like a good idea. Also, one of the creators behind the Altered Carbon anime is writer Dai Satô, who previously worked on Cowboy Bebop. That’s arguably as good as it gets in terms of an anime résumé.
The rest of the shows have less obvious mainstream appeal. One of them, Cagaster Of An Insect Cage, is based on a manga and takes place in a post-apocalyptic world where a disease called “Cagaster” turns people into a giant bugs. Then there’s Yasuke, which is based on a real-life samurai born in Africa who served famous warlord Oda Nobunaga. History can be a little dry, though, so the anime will throw in some stuff about magic and mecha. The final show is Trese, which is based on a Philippine graphic novel about mythical creatures living alongside humans and facing off against a criminal underworld of “malevolent supernatural beings.”