Guillermo del Toro while on the set of Crimson Peak, dropped the bomb a few weeks ago that a new animated series leading up to the release of Pacific Rim 2 would be happening. At the time, not much was known about what the animated series was going to be like, or what it was going to be about, but in an interview with Collide about the debut of his latest TV series The Strain, we finally get some answers.
Del Toro stated that the series is currently set for 13 episodes with only one overarching storyline, where we’ll go in depth with some of the major core ideas of the film:
We’re going for a long arc, so the idea is to show a group of characters—we have pilots, functional jaegers, but we have all these younger characters. I really want to explore things that are complimentary to the things that I want to explore in the second movie: drift, what drifting does to you, what is needed to drift, a lot of stuff that I think is important, but also the jaeger technology, the kaijus being evolved, ideas about the precursors—the guys that control the kaijus. We have a lot of leeway in 13 episodes and I wanna make it sort of in the same spirit of Pacific Rim, which is the ideal audience for Pacific Rim was young—very young, 11-year-olds and so forth—but with really beautiful design and stories that make these characters interesting in a way that I found them interesting in, for example, Year Zero, the graphic novel that we did. And I think that’s the basic thrust of the thing.
They are currently shopping the series around to Japanese production companies to see which one will be the best match, and they’ve begun hiring writers, but we won’t know too much more for some time.
It comes to some relief to know that Del Toro will be keeping the connection alive between films with this animation. Not to mention that he is willing to limit the animated series in order to save the integrity of the story overall, unless it serves the story to do otherwise:
If it connects we’ll go on [to more seasons], but the thing is I don’t want it to be weekly adventures. I don’t want it to be like Chapter One is a little action thing and it gets resolved in 40 minutes or an hour and then the next episode, [it’s like] nothing happened. My favorite anime series always have a long arc.
Pacific Rim 2 will be released on April 7th, 2017.
(via /Film)
