'Pacific Rim' Anime First Look Images Return To The World Of Giant Monsters And Robots

Guillermo del Toro's sci-fi action blockbuster Pacific Rim took inspiration from many anime series that came before it. The idea of giant monsters taking on massive human-controlled robots is an integral part of the Japanese animation arena, and now Pacific Rim will head directly into that territory with Pacific Rim: The Black, a new anime series coming to Netflix in 2021. To tease the forthcoming adaptation, Legendary has released the first Pacific Rim anime photos, showing off the two new main characters in a Jaeger and a hulking kaiju.

The first photo (released by Legendary) takes us inside a Jaeger, but we don't have a name for this particular robot yet, and we don't know what it looks like on the outside. However, the interior looks exactly how it appeared in the Pacific Rim movies.

When the Pacific Rim anime was first announced, we heard the series was about an idealistic teen boy and his naïve younger sister who are forced to pilot an abandoned Jaeger across a hostile landscape in a desperate attempt to find their missing parents. These two are likely those characters.

Since the movie explained about how difficult it can be to pilot a Jaeger, it'll be interesting to see how a pair of young kids like this will fare inside one of these massive robots. But Pacific Rim Uprising had a young girl become one of the star Jaegar pilots, so anything is possible. After all, having a brother and sister pilot a Jaeger together will make them even more compatible when they're drifting.

It wouldn't be Pacific Rim without a massive kaiju, and here it is. Clearly it's been busy destroying some infrastructure, as the smoke lingering behind it indicates. This is quite a beefy kaiju, and the glow underneath the rough, dark skin is a little reminiscent of the creatures from Attack the Block. But instead of the teeth only glowing, it's almost as if there's a layer of aqua-colored magma covering it.

So far, this just looks like a Pacific Rim movie with an anime filter on it. That's fine, but as an anime, Pacific Rim has an uphill battle to stand out from the rest of the mecha versus kaiju projects that are out there. It might be a nice entry point for Pacific Rim fans to get into anime, but will it be satisfying for longtime fans of the Japanese animation medium? While we wait to find out, check out our recommendations of anime to watch for those who liked what Pacific Rim had to offer.

Pacific Rim: The Black is coming from writers Craig Kyle (Thor:Ragnarok) and Greg Johnson (X-Men: Evolution), but beyond that, we don't have any details on directors or the voice cast yet. Netflix will release the series sometime in 2021, but there's no specific release date yet.