Earlier this year, we got the excellent news that Naoya Matsumoto’s fantastic superhero monster manga Kaiju No. 8 would be getting its own anime, and now we know there’s going to be a hell of a team behind it.
Today a new trailer for the series — briefly showing us the series’ protagonist Kafka Hibino in both his human and monstrous kaiju forms — confirmed that legendary Ghost in the Shell animation studio Production I.G. will develop the series, but they won’t be alone. The kaiju designs in the series will be handled by Studio Khara, a.k.a. the team behind Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion rebuild tetralogy, as well as the Shin tokusatsu films Shin Godzilla, Shin Ultraman, and next year’s Shin Kamen Rider.
Kaiju No. 8, a breakout hit from the manga anthology magazine Shonen Jump’s Jump+ digital output since its arrival in 2020, follows Kafka, part of a Kaiju waste disposal team in a near-future Japan repeatedly assaulted by giant monsters, where he wistfully imagines a career as part of the anti-monster Defence Force. But when a small Kaiju bonds with Kafa’s body after an accident, he discovers he has gained the power to transform into a superpowered monster-human hybrid, and begins leading a double life as a new recruit in the Defence Force and the hunted superbeing known only by his new colleagues as Kaiju No. 8.
We’ll be waiting a while to see more from the anime, however — the new trailer also confirms that Kaiju No. 8 won’t hit screens until 2024. That’s plenty of time to catch up with the manga, at least!
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