Breaking: Blade Runner Gets Animated Prequel Short From Cowboy Bebop Creator

Well that’s a nice present for a Thursday evening: Blade Runner 2049 apparently has has an animated short coming out which has been developed by Shinichirō Watanabe, the creative mind behind the anime classic Cowboy Bebop. Titled Blade Runner: Black Out 2022, it’s set to release on September 26th, ahead of the main feature film’s release on October 6th.

Set 27 years before the events in the new film, and three years after the end of the original 1982 neo-noir classic, it involves a mysterious blackout which seems to be connected with the new film’s dystopian wasteland scenes. The new trailer first appears on a tweet from the Blade Runner 2049’s official Japanese twitter account:

【フォロー＆このTweetをRTで応募完了❢】
9/26（火）監督ご本人登壇の本アニメ全世界解禁イベントに30名様をご招待❢
あの渡辺信一郎監督がアニメーションで描く”2022年”の世界。#ブレードランナー2049 に繋がる＜大停電＞#ブラックアウト2022 とはー❓ pic.twitter.com/nMw43rq1Pr

— 映画『ブレードランナー 2049』公式 (@bladerunnerJP) September 14, 2017

In the video, Watanabe credits the original film as being influential in his having chosen his career path towards entertainment and storytelling.

He expresses that his deep feelings led him to feel that they needed to respect the original film and it’s visual style, but also to be careful not make this animated version an imitation of the original. There’s a number of scenes of the character designs and animation process:

Hampton Fancher and Michael Green wrote the 2049 screenplay, which follows up on the original by Fancher and David Peoples, loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Ridley Scott’s original movie — set in the Los Angeles of 2019 — followed Harrison Ford’s Blade Runner named Deckard, who pursued replicants that had escaped from an off-world colony and were loose on Earth.