GDT Dishes on PACIFIC RIM Animation Project

 

Collider has posted excerpts from an exclusive interview with Guillermo del Toro on the PACIFIC RIM animation series.   He says a long narrative arc is planned with 13 episodes.

Click over to Collider for the full article, but here are the interesting Guillermo quotes that were posted:

“We are right now in the middle of talking and negotiating with a few Japanese companies for the animation.  We are talking to a couple of showrunners that have a strong animation background, [we’re] casting the writers room.  What’s great is it’s a great set-up and a link between the first movie and the second movie.  It really enhances the mythology of the characters; we have cameos of characters from the first movie, but mostly it’s a new set of characters.  New jaegers, except for one or two, [and] new kaijus.  It’s really fun.”

“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.”

“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.”

“Legendary is talking to a few outlets so I’d rather not disclose myself.  The way we set up The Strain was to talk to everyone, literally, on the map, and then find who’s response we sort of jibe with the most.  I think in this series, it would be great to find a place that can give it a proper presentation and can advertise the creation of the series.  So we’re open to being pleasantly surprised everywhere.”

The article notes that an animation series takes time to produce, so don’t cross your fingers you will see something anytime soon. Perhaps once an outlet and an animation company is selected, we will start to hear more details.