If the embed wilts, the second teaser is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=we-eaYBtUDE
Science fiction has given us many ways to deal with a dying planet: generation ships, terraforming, Matt Damon. Fool Night has come up with one of the grimmest. Netflix’s adaptation of Kasumi Yasuda’s manga arrives worldwide on Thursday 26th November, with every episode dropping at once, and it is the first time the studios Sunrise and SHAFT have worked together. That alone is a strange marriage. Sunrise is the home of Gundam; SHAFT is the studio behind Madoka Magica and the Monogatari series, and has never met a head tilt it didn’t like.
The premise, set roughly a century from now, is properly bleak. Thick cloud has brought endless winter and night, most plants have died, and oxygen is scarce. Humanity’s answer is “Transfloration”: seeds are implanted in people who are near death, and they turn into oxygen-producing plants called Spiriflor. Our hero is Toshiro Kamiya, who is poor, looking after his sick mother, and seriously thinking about selling his own body to the system for the payout. It is Soylent Green with photosynthesis, or the sort of public-health leaflet John Wyndham might have written after a bad week with the triffids.
Atsushi Yukawa directs, with series composition by Jin Tanaka (Oshi no Ko), character designs by Robert Sato and music by Tatsuya Kato (Dr. Stone). Koki Uchiyama voices Toshiro and Minako Kotobuki plays Yomiko Horai, with Junya Enoki as Akira Yatsuka, an ambitious deputy at a Transfloration hospital, Aya Endo as his bat-swinging bodyguard Saeko Kanaeno, and Kiyomitsu Mizuuchi as Jin Hiragishi, who runs the unofficial section that hires Toshiro as a special temp. The show was announced at Annecy in June, and the release date followed at Anime NYC in August.
The manga has been running in Shogakukan’s Big Comic Superior since 2020 and made the top twenty of the Kono Manga ga Sugoi! list for male readers in 2023. VIZ Media publishes it in English under its VIZ Signature imprint, so anyone who wants a head start, or simply wants to know how much of this is going to hurt, can find out before the end of November.
Netflix hasn’t announced how many episodes there are, only that they all land on the same day. For a series about a world without daylight, binge-watching it in the middle of a British November seems like method viewing. Do open a window afterwards. Ideally near a pot plant, and with an apology.
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