'Pacific Rim: The Black' Teaser: Get Back In The Jaeger With Netflix's Anime Series Next Month
Pacific Rim has gone full circle. Guillermo del Toro's 2013 sci-fi monster movie was a love letter to mecha animes and kaiju flicks, genres that started in Japan before making their way across the globe. And now, Pacific Rim has returned to those roots with the upcoming Netflix anime series Pacific Rim: The Black. Netflix has released the first teaser for Pacific Rim: The Black, along with an official release date. Watch the teaser below.
Pacific Rim The Black Teaser
First announced in 2018, Pacific Rim: The Black finally storms onto Netflix next month, as revealed in the first teaser trailer for the Pacific Rim anime series. The series follows two siblings who are "forced to pilot an abandoned Jaeger across a hostile landscape in a desperate attempt to find their missing parents," in a story that will follow the events of del Toro's 2013 film, and the sequel from Steven S. DeKnight starring John Boyega, which was released in 2018.
The first teaser doesn't show us much more than what we saw in the first-look images released by Legendary late last year. There are the siblings, looking quite trepidatious in the Jaeger suits, and there's a brief glimpse of a glowing kaiju. We do get a sense of the desolate world where the series takes place, with broken Jaegers littering the landscape of a post-apocalyptic Australia where the kaiju have taken over. The teaser ends on a scene with the two siblings getting in the robot, the younger sibling asking her brother what they're going to do. In response, he issues the command, "Initiate the drift."
The 3D anime style is pretty typical of Netflix animes nowadays, and it looks slightly more polished than the awful-looking Godzilla animes the streamer has released, but I can't say I'm still much a fan of this art style. But it's still very fitting that Pacific Rim would eventually become an anime, considering the mecha anime roots of the original film, and considering the capacity for huge action set pieces that anime has over live-action Hollywood blockbusters, no matter their budget. At the very least, we'll get some imaginative-looking kaiju and intense fight scenes that will play out with way more ferocity and speed than we got to see on the big screen.
Pacific Rim: The Black comes from Marvel comics writer Craig Kyle (Thor:Ragnarok) and Marvel animation writer Greg Johnson (X-Men: Evolution), who serve as showrunners, with Polygon Pictures doing the animation. Legendary, which released the Pacific Rim movies, developed the anime series for Netflix.Pacific Rim: The Black debuts on Netflix on March 4, 2021.