Blade Runner: Black Lotus, a new anime series based on the classic sci-fi film Blade Runner, will begin airing in Fall 2021. Though announced in 2018 following the release of the Blade Runner 2049 live-action film, little was known about the project until its reveal at the 2021 Comic Con @ Home online event. The series is a co-production between Adult Swim and Crunchyroll, and a trailer accompanied the announcement. Crunchyroll also showed off the show’s Japanese dub via its Twitter account.
The Blade Runner: Black Lotus trailer establishes the show as taking place in Los Angeles of 2032. This is ten years after the first Blade Runner animated work, the short film Blade Runner: Black Out 2022. A young woman, Elle (voiced by Jessica Henwick in English and Arisa Shida in Japanese) awakes in L.A., with no memories but plenty of deadly skills. She’s a replicant, a bioengineered human created as a source of slave labor. Over the course of the show she’ll investigate her origins and the mystery behind them, and clash with the powerful forces at work behind the scenes.
Blade Runner: Black Lotus will be produced by Alcon Television Group and animated by Japan-based CG animation studio Sola Digital Arts. Sola also produced the films Starship Troopers: Invasion and Traitor of Mars, and the Ultraman and Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045 series for Netflix alongside Production I.G. The series will be directed by Kenji Kamiyama and Shinji Aramaki, who worked on Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, Ghost in the Shell: Standalone Complex, and Ultraman. Shinichiro Watanabe, who directed Cowboy Bebop, Space Dandy, and Blade Runner: Black Out 2022, will serve as in a Creative Producer role.
Blade Runner: Black Lotus will debut in Fall 2021 on Adult Swim and Crunchyroll.
