All You Need Is Kill Anime Film Gets Stylish, Colorful Trailer That Will Probably Piss Off Existing Fans

The movie is being handled by STUDIO4°C, a longstanding animation outfit known for classics like Memories and The Animatrix, as well as visually experimental films like Masaaki Yuasa’s Mind Game and Tekkonkinkreet. That experimentation is very much on display in what we’ve seen of the studio’s latest, as this adaptation of All You Need Is Kill takes place on a vibrant planet full of similarly vivid murder monsters.

The movie is being directed by Kenichiro Akimoto. The apparent protagonist, Rita, will be played by Ai Mikami, and the seeming duetaroganist, Keiji, will be played by Natsuki Hanae (Tanjiro in Demon Slayer, Okarun in Dan Da Dan).

While the All You Need Is Kill’s first film adaptation, Edge of Tomorrow, was generally well-received by both critics and audiences, some fans of the source material took issue with a few of its narrative changes. Specifically, many disliked how it opted for a much more traditional Hollywood ending instead of the original’s more dour conclusion. Meanwhile, the 2014 manga adaptation stuck much more closely to the original.

Funnily enough, STUDIO4°C’s adaptation looks to also be doing its own thing; if you compare the light novel’s grim cover art to the anime’s colorful aesthetic, you’ll see what I mean. Additionally, it appears that the movie will primarily follow Rita instead of the previous protagonist, Keiji. It will be interesting to see how these adaptation decisions land when the film hits theaters—I imagine fans of the original will continue to be peeved, but we’ll see how it lands for others (as someone who does not care about the source material, I’m looking forward to judging the film on its own terms).

You can watch the film’s trailer below: