Pacific Rim Animated Series Details!

In a recent interview with Collider, Guillermo del Toro has dropped some knowledge about the upcoming Pacific Rim animated series. While we’re still a long ways off from release, del Toro has released enough details to give us an idea of what to expect.

First, we know that we’ll get at least 13 episodes, which del Toro promises will be “a long arc.” As we speculated before, the writer/director is staying away from weekly adventures, and it looks as though he will be emulating the franchise’s inspiration, and cult anime classic, Neon Genesis Evangelion.

“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… The idea is to show a group of characters—we have pilots, functional jaegers, but we have all these younger characters.”

Additionally, he promises the series will be “a link between the first movie and the second movie,” and follow a new cast of characters, new jaegers and new kaijus. As to what themes fans can expect the series to cover, it sounds as though del Toro wants to give us more than just robots punching monsters.

“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.”

With all of this great plot and conceptual news, it’s easy to overlook some of the more practical details. Things like where the series might air. As del Toro believes “the ideal audience for Pacific Rim was young… 11-year-olds and so forth,” it would seem that Cartoon Network is the obvious choice. However, he also promises “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.” For the time being, he’s declined to speculate.

“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 whose 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.”

While animated series are often aimed at more mature audiences, they tend to be comedies rather than sci-fi/action. Perhaps the Pacific Rim series will be able to fill the void left by series like Young Justice, which was marketed towards younger audiences, but contained more mature themes and darker story lines than the usual Saturday morning cartoon fare.

No word yet on when we’ll be able to see the animated series on the small screen, but Pacific Rim 2 is currently set to be released Apil 7th, 2017.