The Other Upcoming ‘Death Stranding’ Anime Wants to Wake You Up the Hard Way

We sure hope you’ve blinked away sleep before checking out the new trailer for the anime adaptation of Hideo Kojima‘s post-apocalyptic video game, Death Stranding, because it’ll jolt you awake whether you want to be or not.  

We’ve known for a bit that the celebrated video game designer (whose body is composed of 70 percent movies) was branching out his supernatural-tinged courier game to the screen with A24. Kojima also loves anime—so much so that he’s got two anime titles in development. Now, a year after we got a peek at the anime film, Death Stranding Mosquito, we finally got a looky-loo at Kojima Productions’ other anime adaptation of the series coming to Hulu and Disney Plus: Death Stranding Isolations, coming in 2027.

Here’s the show’s official logline:

The Death Stranding—a catastrophic series of explosions caused when the dead crept into our world and collided with the living.

In the wake of this cataclysm, many were forced to live in absolute isolation—among them, a young girl. Although this lonely existence was forced upon her, she soon grows to prefer solitude, eschewing all opportunities for real human connection and allowing herself to be strung along by fate.

The story is set in North America immediately after Sam—the protagonist of the game—reconnects the continent by means of the Chiral Network. However, as America is reborn from the ashes, the renewed connections that bind it together bring about new and unforeseen consequences.

In this tumultuous new landscape, there are some who walk a different path to the one chosen by Sam and his Bridges comrades: a wise old man who connects people through a method that defies all reckoning; a female soldier ensnared in a cycle of war and destruction; a boy who seethes with rage at the absurdity of his life…and of course, the girl who chose to sever all ties with the outside world…Fate has other plans for her, however, and chance encounters see her launched headfirst into a world she does not recognize.

Death Stranding is a deceptively dense world to parse and describe to someone who hasn’t played the game. On the surface, players act as a glorified mailman, connecting folks holed up in sci-fi bunkers through a string of tricky deliveries across treacherous terrain. All of that gets exponentially harder with rain that accelerates time and ink-like ghosts that appear and, once they get their hands on you, leave a cataclysmic crater in their wake. We’re guessing that’s what happened to our blonde protagonist’s mom at some point. That’d explain the night terrors. Tragic. But, for our purposes, that makes for an intriguing anime premise.

“One of the unique abilities of entertainment is its power to enhance the spirituality of those who consume it, and I think this is something that Mr. Kojima’s works have always achieved,” director Takayuki Sano wrote in a press release. “As a result, I approached this production with an exceptionally strong sense of duty and responsibility. I knew that no matter what, I needed to accomplish the same thing.”

Kojima Productions and anime studio E&H Production (Ninja Kamui/Bullet Bullet) are producing Death Stranding Isolations, with character designs by Ilya Kuvshinov (Ghost in the Shell SAC_2045). While Kojima executive produces the show, he isn’t the scribe behind Death Stranding Isolations. That distinction goes to award-winning writer Tow Ubukata, whose past works include Mardock Scramble, Le Chevalier D’Eon, Heroic Age, and series composition for the Fafner in the Azure series, Ghost in the Shell: Arise, Psycho-Pass 2, and Psycho-Pass 3. All that to say, he fits right at home expanding a sci-fi world like Death Stranding.

Folks can look forward to Death Stranding Isolations when it premieres on Disney+ and Hulu sometime in 2027.

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