‘Blame!’ 2 Anime Movie Sequel Inspired By ‘Blame!’ Manga Confirmed In 2017 For Upcoming Netflix Season
A Blame! 2 movie sequel has officially been confirmed by a director at Polygon Pictures, producer of the first Blame! anime movie in addition to the popular Knights Of Sidonia series. The Blame! sequel will be the second major story by manga writer Tsutomu Nihei to be released as a 3D anime during a Netflix season. In addition, the Blame! manga has been completed for years so there’s plenty of source material to draw upon.
The Blame! anime movie follows a Terminator-like cyborg named Killy as he wanders through a dystopian future set in a self-replicating city called the megastructure. An infection created by cultists thousands of years ago (which is explained in the Noise! manga prequel) caused the city’s AI to consider humans threats to the city and so a defense system known as Safeguard sends killer robots to hunt down the remnants of humanity. On behalf of an entity called the Authority, Killy the Wanderer is seeking humans who have the Net Terminal Gene, which should restore society since the gene would allow humans to control the robots by giving the Authority the ability to override Safeguard. Thus, the story in the Blame! movie represents a small part of the millennia-long power struggle between the Authority and Safeguard systems, with many details about Killy not yet revealed by the movie series.
Oddly enough, the Blame! manga was finished 20 years ago, way before the Knights Of Sidonia manga was ever inked onto a page, but it was the Knights Of Sidonia anime that breathed life into the Blame! anime movie. In Knights Of Sidonia Season 2, Polygon Pictures inserted a scene where the characters watched an anime on TV that featured Killy. The fan response to this Easter egg was so strong that Polygon Pictures director Hiroyuki Seshita and author Nihei decided to create a full-blown Blame! movie.
In return, the success of the first Blame! anime movie was used as a gauge for whether they should make Knights Of Sidonia Season 3. During the 2016 Comic-Con International in San Diego, the director was asked about future plans and he claimed the Blame! 2 movie sequel all depended on Netflix anime fans.
“If you watch and support Knights of Sidonia and do the same for Blame!, that will increase our chances of that coming true,” Seshita said, according to Anime News Network.
The first Blame! movie was released on May 19, 2017 and it must have been popular during this Netflix season since only a month later the director confirmed plans for the Blame! 2 movie. According to tweets from those who attended the 2017 AnnecyInternational Animated Film Festival and Market (MIFA), Seshita “announced the production of the sequel to the movie Blame!”
As of this publishing, anime production company Polygon Pictures has not announced anything official about the Blame! 2 release date. What is even more unclear is where the story for Blame! 2 may go next. The anime borrowed many elements from the Blame! manga but it largely featured original content created by author Nihei. The manga’s story covered events that took place in Killy’s 3,000 years of existence while the Blame! movie was focused on a single time frame.
What does that mean for Netflix anime fans? It’s likely that the Blame! 2 movie sequel will only be inspired by the manga, instead of a direct adaptation, but we’ll just have to watch the upcoming Netflix movie to find out!
[Featured Image by Polygon Pictures]
