Upcoming Blade Runner Series Finally Drops An Epic New Trailer

The newest series, Blade Runner Black Lotus just dropped its latest trailer and it looks pretty amazing, a cool window into this world

By Cristina Alexander | Updated

This article is more than 2 years old

The Blade Runner franchise is coming out with a new anime series courtesy of directors Shinji Aramaki and Kenji Kamiyama. It will dive deep into the lore of the dystopian sci-fi universe created by Ridley Scott in 1982 and the replicants that inhabit it. The first trailer for Blade Runner: Black Lotus, the first CGI-animated series in the franchise, dropped during Comic-Con at Home back in July, saying it will come out sometime this fall. Now there’s another gorgeous trailer out in the wild with a premiere date that’s just around the corner.

The nearly three-minute trailer takes a better look at the plot of Blade Runner: Black Lotus. It surrounds a young woman named Elle, a replicant who questions everything she’s currently going through, having no memory of what happened to her. She evades Los Angeles Police officers, attempts to uncover the mystery behind the origins of the replicants, including herself, and vows to kill the people who have abused her. You can check out the stunning clip below.

Blade Runner: Black Lotus takes place 13 years after the events of the award-winning original film starring Harrison Ford and 10 years after the events of Black Out. The anime is told from the perspective of a replicant named Elle (voiced by Jessica Henwick in the English dub), who wakes up with a case of amnesia. She wanders the streets of Los Angeles in 2032 to figure out who she is and where she came from. When she gets cornered in a back alley by a group of thugs, her programming boots back up to make her do what she was created to do: defend herself against anyone who threatens her. The only clues she has that are key to her mystery are a locked data device and a black lotus tattooed on her arm, hence the title.

Blade Runner: Black Lotus is the product of a collaboration between Crunchyroll and Adult Swim, the primetime programming block on Cartoon Network. They also had some additional help with production thanks to their partnership with Alcon Television group. The CGI style of the anime takes after Aramaki and Kamiyama’s work on Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, which departed the traditional hand-drawn style they have employed in previous installations of the series, including Ghost in the Shell: SAC 2nd Gig.

In a behind-the-scenes interview with Adult Swim, series producers Joseph Chou explained that Black Lotus pays homage to the legacy and impact that the Blade Runner franchise left on the cyberpunk genre, bringing out some of the greatest anime fans have come to know and love, including Akira and Cowboy Bebop. Chou cites The Animatrix and the Netflix series Knights of the Zodiac: Saint Seiya as his inspiration to start his career in creating anime within a cyberpunk environment. Meanwhile, Aramaki and Kamiyama explain the painstaking challenge of making sure Black Lotus remains a faithful adaptation of the original film and the sequels it spawned in the last 40 years.

Blade Runner: Black Lotus premieres November 14 exclusively on Adult Swim and Crunchyroll.