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Devilman Crybaby director to helm new 2020 Netflix anime series: “Japan Sinks 2020”

Katy Kelly Oct 13, 2019
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The series will comprise of 10 episodes based on the classic Japanese sci-fi novel.

Every country has its landmark science fiction authors. The U.K. has the famed Malorie Blackman, Iain Banks and Mary Shelley, while America’s sci-fi stars include Margaret Atwood, Isaac Asimov and Octavia Butler. Japan is no different: you might have even seen a few famous sci-fi authors’ works in anime or video game form, like Yasutaka Tsutsui’s Paprika or The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, or Parasite Eve by Hideki Sena.

One classic author is the late Sakyo Komatsu, recipient of multiple literary awards and with an expansive bibliography spanning the 1960s to the mid-2000s. Arguably his most famous novel is Japan Sinks (Nihon Chinbotsu), a 1973 novel portraying… well, Japan sinking. The novel details not only a hypothetical near-future where geological events suck the Japanese archipelago beneath the ocean, but the Japanese population’s response to their new reality as a nomadic race.

And soon we’ll be treated to a 10-episode streaming anime series based on that same novel, courtesy of Japanese animation studio Science Saru.

DEVILMAN crybaby director Masaaki Yuasa takes on Sakyo Komatsu's classic disaster novel with Japan Sinks:2020, an original anime series coming next year! #JapanSinks pic.twitter.com/FoysLXNn0I

— Netflix Geeked (@NetflixGeeked) October 8, 2019

Japan Sinks 2020 will deviate from the novel in that rather than focusing on marine biologists and geographical science in a post-nuclear bombing Japan, the series will be updated to take place directly after the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. While the novel favors broad strokes of the disasters’ impact on the country, Japan Sinks 2020 will follow Ayumi and Go Muto (name readings currently unconfirmed), a brother and sister in an ordinary four-person family.

The project will be directed by animation auteur Masaaki Yuasa, head of Science Saru, whose credits include Netflix’s Devilman Crybaby, Kaiba and Ping Pong the Animation. Yuasa stated that in this work he would “challenge himself to find answers to questions that plagued him as a child, such as ‘What makes a country?’ ‘What makes someone Japanese?’ ‘What decides the borders of where you come from?’ ‘Or can those borders even be decided?'”

Longtime Yuasa collaborator Kensuke Ushio will compose the score for Japan Sinks 2020, while two others, Pyeonggang Heo and Eriko Kimura, will handle series and sound direction respectively. Flip Flappers alumni Naoya Wada is responsible for character design, Dragonball Super‘s Toshio Yoshitaka will serve as scriptwriter, and Tokyo Magnitude 8.0‘s Kiyoshi Hirose is the series’ editor. Satoshi Hashimoto (Color Design) and Toshikazu Kuno (Photography Director) round out the staff credited to the project so far.