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Sci-Fi Television

Netflix Shares First Six Minutes of New Anime Series 'Terminator Zero' (netflix.com) 66

Posted by EditorDavid from the I'll-be-back dept.
"It's going to be violent," warns the creator of Terminator Zero, an eight-episode anime series premiering Thursday August 29th on Netflix. "It's going to be dark, it's going to be horrific, and it's going to be arresting."

And the Netflix blog has now shared the first six minutes online: In the world of Terminator, the future is never set, yet some things are guaranteed: The Terminator is still a cyborg that feels no remorse, pity, or fear. The anime series TERMINATOR ZERO, landing on Netflix on Aug. 29 — known to fans as Judgment Day — looks different from any incarnation of the Terminator franchise we've seen before, but you can tell from these opening six minutes that the brutal, sophisticated action will remain.

"I realized the first minutes of the show have to declare what it is," creator and executive producer Mattson Tomlin tells Tudum. A joint production between Skydance and the Japanese animation studio Production I.G, TERMINATOR ZERO has the challenge of drawing in both anime fans and fans of the Terminator series. "The way to do that was to have a sequence that had no dialogue, that was really planting a flag in letting everybody know this is going to be violent, it's going to be dark, it's going to be action-driven, it's going to be horrific, and it's going to be arresting," says Tomlin, who previously wrote Project Power for Netflix and is currently writing The Batman Part II. "That's just what it has to be."
The series follows "a new batch of characters who live in Japan in 1997," writes CBR — and in an interview the show's director said "There's a balance" when representing Japan's actual culture while keeping the show futuristic: One of the things that I really took for granted was guns. [Points to self] Dumb American over here had to write a scene where Eiko gets into a parking lot and smashes the window of a car, goes to the glove box, takes out a revolver, and it instantly gets flagged. [Other people working on the series] were like, "No, we don't have guns. What you are describing, that's over there. We're over here in civilization where that can't happen." That triggered a really fruitful and creatively challenging discussion about weapons. The military has guns and the police have guns. That's kind of it. So these characters have to arm themselves. How are they going to do it? What could we do? And that's why the Terminator has a crossbow. Eiko has all of these different weapons that she concocted from a hardware store. It was all born out of that.
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Netflix Shares First Six Minutes of New Anime Series 'Terminator Zero' More

Netflix Shares First Six Minutes of New Anime Series 'Terminator Zero'

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  • How easy is it to lose a bunch of other peopleâ(TM)s money? Bullets and no plot. Itâ(TM)s like an executive watched someone play a video game and had a brain wave. And not a good one.

  • Anime (Score:5, Insightful)

    by RitchCraft ( 6454710 ) on Saturday August 24, 2024 @10:22PM (#64732768)

    I honestly have no idea why anime is so popular. I tried watching it and personally find it to be quite badly drawn and animated. I'm 56 though so I supposed I'm spoiled by the classics from my childhood.

    • ... badly drawn and animated.

      What? I grew-up with 1960/1970s American animation too: Anime wasn't a thing. Late 1990s, Japan started exporting their culture and blew American art out of the water. The set in feature-length anime has 10 times the detail of American-made art. Then, there are exceptional works like "Steamboy" and the middle years of Ghibli Studios.

      The early studio's stories were the police/soldier & magic/technology dynamic being a big part of the story. Now, the dynamic is teenage love-triangles: It's great

      • I grew up roughly the same time, but surely you remember Robotech showing up thanks to Harmony Gold in the mid 80s.

      • What? I grew-up with 1960/1970s American animation too: Anime wasn't a thing.

        I'm not sure that's correct. I remember in the early 1970s running home from school to get there in time for Speed Racer. The show was very popular in my corner of the US at least, even though the term "anime" didn't yet exist (AFAIK).

        • I didn't care for the animation with Speed Racer (nor Hanna Barbera's stuff, for that matter), but the stories were alright. And it had a monkey.

          Then there was Simba the Lion, which, despite the often sappy morality, was watched because it followed SR. TOBOR the Eight Man. And other Japanese titles that got airplay on a local little UHF station.

          While old-style full animation is what I've always preferred, I do remember growing to like more story-driven animation as I matured.

          Fritz The Cat, anyone?

      • Re: Anime (Score:4)

        by unami ( 1042872 ) on Sunday August 25, 2024 @08:22AM (#64733384)
        Here in Europe we grew up with japanese Anime in the 70ies and 80ies. Maya, the Honeybee, Vicky the Vinking, Heidi, Girl from the Alps, The Story of Perrine, The dog of Flanders,... My favourite TV-series as a kid in zhe early 80ies was Captain Future, a.k.a. Kyaputen FyÅchÄ by TÅei Animation. So, no, they absolutely didn't start to export those in the late 90ies. Maybe that's when the US finally noticed them (see also the paragraph about guns in the story above about cultural differences. It's not like you can find guns in glove compartments in the vast majority of the world - that's only in a few, pretty violent corners).

      • >What? I grew-up with 1960/1970s American animation too: Anime wasn't a thing. Late 1990s, Japan started exporting their culture

        I'm in my 50s, but I watched American dubs of anime when I was a kid in Canada.

        - Starblazers (Space Battleship Yamato)
        - Robotech (Macross, Super Dimension Cavalry Southern Cross, Genesis Climber MOSPEADA
        - Battle of the Planets (Science Ninja Team Gatchaman)
        - Grendizer (UFO Robot Grendizer)
        -Spaceketeers (Sci-Fi West Saga Starzinger)

        I think most of those were early 80s, but Engli

    • Incidentally, most anime fans will tell you that regardless of whether this show turns out to be good or not...

      It's probably not anime.

    • I'm 58 and agree with you. However, my Dad is 84 and watches anime, which is a mystery to me.

      • No mystery: there are various anime shows targeted to many audiences, including older people. Also, maybe your father is wiser than you. (I am 51 and like anime)

    • I don't really like the style of drawing, but the main problem is that the "animation" it is very lazy for the most part. Often it's just a still image with the camera slowly panning with some cgi snow or rain overlaid. Characters are often facing away from the camera while talking so they don't have to animate the mouths. Lots of lazy cost-cutting tricks to avoid animation. It feels like one of those "motion comics" where people try to make a comic book seem more alive with slow zooms and voice-overs.

      • Then watch the trailer for Terminator Zero, it has high production value and advanced animation. There are some anime made with tight budgets, animated like you say, and there are some much more expensive ones. PS: how about the awful cost-cutting in western animations like Scooby Doo?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      I honestly have no idea why anime is so popular. I tried watching it and personally find it to be quite badly drawn and animated. I'm 56 though so I supposed I'm spoiled by the classics from my childhood.

      That's OK. Because everyone has their tastes. You don't like anime? So do I. I appreciate what they are, but they're not for me. I'll quietly nope my way out of any anime watching session if I can, knowing I'll be bored to tears.

      But that's OK - these are things of taste and tastes vary. They don't appeal to

    • I'm 56 though so I supposed I'm spoiled by the classics from my childhood.

      I am 51 and I do like anime. Why? Precisely because they are different from the "classics", they are a breath of fresh air, a new perspective and some new stories (for me). Yes, after watching a ton of anime you learn their style and stories, but there are still plenty of new things.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      You need to find some anime that appeals to you. That's why it's popular, it covers so many different genera, there's something for everyone.

      Keep in mind that until maybe the last decade, most of what got translated to English and officially released was aimed at teenage boys, i.e. lots of violence and boobs. Since the 90s there has been a fan subtitling scene that releases more interesting stuff, and nowadays there are even come decent commercial releases.

    • I honestly have no idea why anime is so popular. I tried watching it and personally find it to be quite badly drawn and animated. I'm 56 though so I supposed I'm spoiled by the classics from my childhood.

      I mean there's lots of reasons to not like anime but "badly drawn and animated" is a weird choice. I mean there are aesthetic choices and cultural difference but the actual quality of anime is imo pretty unquestionably excellent (as a whole) there's obviously bad anime and good anime from a purely mechanical perspective but most of it looks really good now. If you're gonna dislike anime you'd have a better argument with the weird proportions, over sexualization, cringe screaming, repetitive narratives, and

    • Somebody at /. has a sense of humor. Today's MOTD?

      "Hello again, Peabody here..." -- Mister Peabody

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      there is an anime for everybody, the range of production quality is so big it is impossible to say that all anime is badly drawn and animated. the most well known anime movie productions are in fact admired because of their quality animation (akira, ghost in the shell, all of ghibli).

  • Considering all the submissions that don't make it to the front page, is this the best you can do?

    • Considering all the submissions that don't make it to the front page, is this the best you can do?

      The technology to do time travel. The technology to create thinking robots which can and will kill you. The technology needed to kill the robot.

      Considering we have robots which can act like humans and we are working our way toward software which can think like humans, the technology angle is right in front of you.

  • I am not impressed (Score:5, Interesting)

    by war4peace ( 1628283 ) on Sunday August 25, 2024 @02:58AM (#64733042)

    The same old 10 FPS animation with limited dynamics.
    The same old weird character decisions and acting that make no sense.
    The same old convenient "missed the main good character while shooting them with a rotary machine gun for minutes".
    The same old "oh, no, the rope is giving... oh wait it's not" cliché.
    The same old "Bad character could have finished good character 100 times but for some reason chose not to", looks like a parent "battling" their toddler and "losing" the fight to make the toddler feel good.

    One thing I liked, though, the 4 second waves animation was nice.

    • The same old 10 FPS animation with limited dynamics.

      That's too bad. I haven't watched any anime in a while (just finally got bored with it I guess) but the last one I was impressed by was Naruto. They would often vary the frame rate during battles, some scenes in which were lifted directly (frame-by-frame!) from great classic martial arts movies.

      I don't see the appeal of translating Terminator into anime. To my mind, the best genre for it now is video gaming. For me, anime was always about stuff that couldn't really be visualized any other way. Today, most o

    • The same old 10 FPS animation with limited dynamics. The same old weird character decisions and acting that make no sense. The same old convenient "missed the main good character while shooting them with a rotary machine gun for minutes". The same old "oh, no, the rope is giving... oh wait it's not" cliché. The same old "Bad character could have finished good character 100 times but for some reason chose not to", looks like a parent "battling" their toddler and "losing" the fight to make the toddler feel good.

      One thing I liked, though, the 4 second waves animation was nice.

      ""The way to do that was to have a sequence that had no dialogue..."
      Except for the dialogue a minute fifteen seconds in. But I suppose that was more monologue.

      Terminators apparently don't weigh a lot anymore.

      The same old "good character is fragile and hanging on a rope but bad character can't think of cutting the rope."
      The same old "good character can see things in the dark the viewers can't."
      The same old "good character can hold onto a rope with the weight of multiple characters dangling, and can

    • Huuuuuuuuuuuuh?

      I don't care!

      Tiny pants go nation! Ooooooh. Uh?

  • Disappointing.

  • Terminator can't hit nothing..... Extreme violence....nothing new.

  • A Terminator show made by the studio that did Ghost in the Shell? Definitely waiting for it.

    • I'd watch that so hard, most likely.

      Hell, a Terminator IN Ghost in the Shell. Of course, the Major would call that "Tuesday". Then complain about how primitive it was and how backward the successor US country that sent it was(whether that be the Russo-American Alliance, American Empire, or the USA). It's weird. The splits don't even make sense from a US perspective.

  • ... when the BEST sequence has you shouting at the screen "STOP SHOOTING AT THEIR FEET!".

    Aimbots are EASY to program, easier than walking.

    • Yeah, I winced when the terminator managed to shoot left, right, and below her with the minigun, and still miss.

      I'd have told the choreography and animation people "It's a terminator. If it can get that gun on her, she's dead."
      So, popping out when the terminator is distracted elsewhere is good. But I'd emphasize that she needs to be incredibly good.

      Things like moving such that it can't bring the gun to bear because of a pillar. Faking it out. Using more equipment - let's say a terminator-specific flashb

  • This isnâ(TM)t original anymore. We donâ(TM)t need more dark gritty realism in 2024.

  • I've watched a lot of anime. Still, is this information or technology?
    • You're a (computer)? geek, so you must enjoy consuming a lot of comics^Wgraphic novels and anime. It's true because The Big Bang Theory said so.

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