Production I.G has been in the business for over 35 years and has more than 100 unique anime productions to its name. This includes highly-celebrated series such Haikyu!!, Cromartie High School, and this year’s breakout hit, Kaiju No. 8, but Production I.G is especially skilled when it comes to futuristic cyberpunk dystopian sagas. Ghost in the Shell and PSYCHO-PASS are two of Production I.G’s biggest properties, and they’re practically synonymous with mature cyberpunk thrillers. Zillion, Production I.G’s inaugural series, even featured a remarkably Terminator-esque concept where a race of warrior cyborgs attempt to eradicate all humans in the future.
Production I.G has built a name for itself as the anime studio to turn to for mature storytelling, complex world-building, and bleak themes brought to life with clean, impressive visuals and a dark animation style (excluding their sports anime). It’s Production I.G that Quentin Tarantino recruited for Kill Bill: Vol. 1’s ultra-violent anime sequence, and the studio has become well-versed in re-contextualizing established franchises through an anime lens.
One of Production I.G’s most successful series, Guilty Crown, focuses on a scourge known as the Apocalypse Virus that spreads through Japan, causes chaos, and creates a scenario that’s reminiscent of Terminator’s Judgment Day, only if Skynet were successful in their oppressive agenda. In many ways, Production I.G’s past works and the recurring themes that they’ve routinely explored have acted as the perfect preparation for a project like Terminator Zero. It’s the culmination of nearly four decades of cutting-edge anime storytelling, as if the studio has been training for this moment, just like Terminator’s Kyle Reese.
Koichi Bansho, Production I.G’s animation producer, celebrates how the series feels very in sync with past Production I.G projects. “We were incredibly fortunate to have Atsushi Takeuchi and Yukinobu Tsuneki, renowned for their work on the Ghost in the Shell and PSYCHO-PASS series, as part of the mecha design team for Terminator Zero,” says Bansho. Their expertise and contribution to building the sci-fi aesthetics for this title are unparalleled.”
Mattson Tomlin, Terminator Zero’s showrunner and sole writer (who’s also co-writer on The Batman Part II with Matt Reeves), was already a fan of Production I.G’s signature brand of anime sci-fi melodrama. Tomlin was excited to work with Production I.G when he began scripting an animated Terminator series. “They’re at the very top of the list of dream partners to work with, so for me, it was a matter of making sure that I was writing material that played to their incredible strengths,” says Tomlin. “The partnership between myself and director [Masashi] Kudo was very much built on challenging each other to go higher and harder and do our very best work.”
Fleshing Out a Cyberpunk Dystopia
One of Terminator Zero’s most exciting and original qualities is that it doesn’t just depict a new Terminator story, but one that’s specifically set in Japan. This presented some curious challenges to both Production I.G and Tomlin regarding the execution of his story and how to flesh out this world.