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Viz Media to Release Blame! Anime Film on Home Video
posted on by Karen Ressler
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Viz Media announced at its New York Comic Con panel on Thursday that it has licensed the home video rights to the Blame! anime. The company plans to release the film on Blu-ray Disc and DVD. Both editions will include an art gallery and the Blu-ray Disc edition will include the "Making of Blame!" documentary directed by Hiroyuki Seshita.
The film premiered worldwide on Netflix on May 20. Hiroyuki Seshita (Ajin), who previously co-directed the anime adaptation of Nihei's Knights of Sidonia manga series, directed the film at Polygon Pictures. Nihei himself handled the film's script and character design, and also served as "creative consultant."
The film's official site describes the all-new story:
In the distant technological future, civilization has reached its ultimate Net-based form. An "infection" in the past caused the automated systems to spiral out of order, resulting in a multi-leveled city structure that replicates itself infinitely in all directions. Now humanity has lost access to the city's controls, and is hunted down and purged by the defense system known as the Safeguard. In a tiny corner of the city, a little enclave known as the Electro-Fishers is facing eventual extinction, trapped between the threat of the Safeguard and dwindling food supplies. A girl named Zuru goes on a journey to find food for her village, only to inadvertently cause doom when an observation tower senses her and summons a Safeguard pack to eliminate the threat. With her companions dead and all escape routes blocked, the only thing that can save her now is the sudden arrival of Killy The Wanderer, on his quest for the Net Terminal Genes, the key to restoring order to the world.
Nihei launched the science-fiction action story Blame! as his first manga series in Kodansha's Monthly Afternoon magazine in 1997, and ended it in 2003. Tokyopop published the 10-volume manga in North America. Kodansha published a new "master's edition" of the manga in Japan in 2015 that had six volumes. Vertical is releasing this new version of the manga in English.
The manga inspired a new novel adaptation written by Tow Ubukata (Ghost in the Shell Arise, Psycho-Pass 2 series composition) that shipped on May 26. The series inspired an anthology of short stories, written by the following science-fiction authors: Issui Ogawa (The Lord of the Sands of Time), Nozomu Kuoka (Escape Speed light novel series), Tobi Hirotaka (Autogenic Dreaming: Interview with the Columns of Clouds), Denpō Torishima (Kaikin no Tada), and Mado Nozaki (Babylon, know). The anthology shipped on May 31.
The film itself also inspired a manga adaptation by artist Kōtarō Sekine (Ninja Slayer Kills) that debuted on April 26 and is approaching its finale.
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