Blame!, the story of a guy with a fancy gun wandering the wastes of a dystopian sci-fi future, is my favourite manga of all time. So it’s exciting to see Tsutomu Nihei’s tale finally get the movie treatment it’s long deserved.
Having been teased as a TV commercial inside the world of the anime adaptation of another of Nihei’s works, Knights of Sidonia, Blame! now has a trailer and full announcement of its own.
Looks like the action is going to focus on a particular section of the manga, when our hero Killy comes across a colony of humans trying to survive in a world where monsters and machines (or a combination of the two) are the more common inhabitants.
What made Blame!’s manga so cool was the size of its world, and the way Nihei’s stark black & white art made it all come to life with a terrifying sense of overwhelming scale. It’s set in the distant future, where after thousands of years of construction and technological advancement the Earth has grown so large that it’s now basically a giant building, one so big nobody knows where it begins or ends.
Killy travels across this world—now almost deserted and in decay—like Clint Eastwood in a Spaghetti Western, letting his gun do most of the talking as he encounters mutants, cyborgs and everything in between.
Nimei will be serving as “creative consultant” on the project, while Polygon Pictures and Hiroyuki Seshita (both from Knights of Sidonia) will be animating and directing respectively.