← Back to the Library

What Is the 2017 Blame! Film?

Twenty years after the first log, the City moved: a CG film that tells its own story inside Nihei’s world, and won Japan’s top effects honors for it.

The film had a longer gestation than most series get in total. A CG Blame! feature was first announced in 2007, with Micott and Basara producing; a two part Production I.G short, Blame! Prologue, trailed it the same year. The studio’s bankruptcy in 2011 killed that version outright.

The film that exists was announced in November 2015, in the back of the final volume of Knights of Sidonia. Polygon Pictures animated it, Hiroyuki Seshita directed, Sadayuki Murai wrote the screenplay from a story by Nihei himself, and Yugo Kanno scored it. Rather than compress ten volumes, it builds an original story around the Electro-Fishers, the human tribe from the manga’s third volume: a starving village, a girl named Zuru, and a wanderer who says he has climbed from 6,000 levels below.

THE RELEASE

May 20, 2017

Two doors, one day

The film opened in Japanese cinemas for a limited two week run and streamed worldwide on Netflix on the same day, May 20, 2017: 106 minutes, the manga’s first feature in any form.

The voices

Takahiro Sakurai is Killy, Kana Hanazawa is Cibo, and Saori Hayami is Sanakan: a cast of near silence for Killy, carried, as in the manga, by the women around him.

The verdicts

IndieWire graded it B minus and called the world building more engaging than the plotting; Paste praised it as faithful and newly welcoming at once. The industry agreed with the craft: the film took the Excellence and Best awards in the animated theatrical category at the 2018 VFX-Japan Awards, and a Jury Selection at the 21st Japan Media Arts Festival.

ON DISC AND PAPER

The film’s own shelf

Japanese Blu-ray, 2017

Released November 1, 2017. The limited edition bundled an exclusive epilogue manga by Nihei, Blame! Fortress of Silicon Creatures, drawn to follow the film’s ending.

Viz Media, 2018

Viz Media licensed the home video rights and released the film on Blu-ray and DVD in North America on March 27, 2018.

The tie-in books

Kotaro Sekine’s manga adaptation, Blame! The Electrofishers’ Escape, ran in Monthly Shonen Sirius across 2017 and collected in February 2018; a novel by Tow Ubukata shipped in May 2017 alongside an anthology of short fiction by Japanese science fiction authors.

What Is the 2017 Blame! Film?

THE RELEASE

ON DISC AND PAPER

THE FIRST WORD