There are anime projects that announce their
trailer. And then there's ZAN, which announced it was going to
exist in 2010, never existed, reinvented itself in 2022, and now in
2026 finally has a real staff and a trailer that debuts on July 3 at
the Anime Expo in Los Angeles. Yes, fifteen years. But hey, here we
are.
The direction is in charge of Masashi
Ikeda and Toru Yoshida, but the name that will make fans
of the classic mecha feel right in the chair is that of Ryosuke
Takahashi, the creator and director of Armored Trooper Votoms,
who is in charge of supervising the scripts. Add to that Moriyasu
Taniguchi as chief animation director and Kunio Okawara in
mechanical design, another name of those who built the genre. It's basically a
meeting of those in the know, called by the man who put a face to Final
Fantasy.
The project also changed its format along the
way: what started as a film is now advancing as a limited animated
series. Takahashi, Yoshida, and Taniguchi are going to be present at the
Anime Expo when the first trailer drops, so if you're planning to go, you know
which panel you can't miss.
A detail worth mentioning: ZAN comes with a
play-to-earn blockchain game and NFT art leg in between, with the Singaporean
company Trophee involved in that part. That may sound good or
bad to you depending on who you ask, but the creative core of the project is
clearly separate from that.
Yoshitaka Amano has been active in the industry since he
joined Tatsunoko Production at the age of 15. If you've watched Vampire
Hunter D, played any Final Fantasy from the classic era,
or read Sandman: The Dream Hunters with Neil Gaiman, you
already know his work even if you didn't know his name. ZAN is
his most personal project: an animated series based on his own DEVA ZAN artwork,
which he oversees from Yoshitaka Amano Inc., the company he
recently founded in Los Angeles. The first version was announced as a film in
2010, never made it to 2012 as promised, it was reinvented as a series in 2022
and now, with confirmed staff and trailer ready, it is the most concrete
version it has had since it exists.
