The Art of Pacific Rim: The Black E-Book

Andrew Osmond

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 114

Beschreibung

Official art book of Seasons 1 and 2 of the anime series Pacific Rim: The Black, featuring concept art created during the development of the series.Pacific Rim: The Black burst onto TV screens in March 2021, marking a bold new chapter in the Pacific Rim franchise. Its captivating story of young siblings Taylor and Hayley and their epic trek across the desolate Australian landscape to track down their parents was captured in dynamic anime style, complete with earth-shaking Kaiju-Jaeger battles and a cast of unforgettable characters.The Art of Pacific Rim: The Black retraces Taylor and Hayley's dramatic odyssey from the perspectives of the talented producers, directors, writers and animators who created this immensely popular series. They provide fascinating insight into how the series came about, the development of the characters, the design of the Kaiju and Jaegers, and much more. This lush, coffee table hardback book is packed with stunning imagery from the series, including sketches, concept art and final renders. With an exclusive foreword from showrunner Greg Johnson and visuals covering Seasons 1 and 2, there has never been a better time to dive deeper into 'The Black'!

Leseprobe

THE ART OF

THE ART OF

ISBN: 9781789099454Ebook ISBN: 9781803361024

Published byTitan BooksA division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd144 Southwark StLondonSE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2022

2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1

© 2022 Legendary Comics. All Rights Reserved.Pacific Rim: The Black ™ & © 2022 Legendary. All Rights Reserved.

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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, ortransmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of thepublisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that inwhich it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequentpurchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

THE ART OF

ANDREW OSMOND

CONTENTS

6FOREWORD

8INTRODUCTION

14

THE JAPANESE CONNECTION

20

OPENING COMMUNICATIONS

26

EAST MEETS WEST

32

ASSETS AND STYLE

38

THE CONTINUING STORY

44SEASON 1

46

CHAPTER ONE: SHADOW BASIN

68

CHAPTER TWO: INTO THE WILDERNESS

78

CHAPTER THREE: MONSTER HUNTERS

90

CHAPTER FOUR: COPPERHEAD RETURNS

98

CHAPTER FIVE: KILL YOUR DARLINGS

104

CHAPTER SIX: THE DRONE IN THE BONEYARD

108

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE BOY AND THE BEAST

114SEASON 2

116

CHAPTER EIGHT: SISTERS AND SPIDERS

124

CHAPTER NINE: THE MADMAN

130

CHAPTER TEN: THE BETRAYAL

134

CHAPTER ELEVEN: SHANE’S LAST STAND

142

CHAPTER TWELVE: MONSTERS IN THE TEMPLE

146

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: LIFE IS BUT A DREAM

152

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: IT HAS BEEN AN HONOR

FOREWORD

I knew full well the kind of movie I was about to watchwhen the house lights dimmed. Giant robots against giantmonsters. Jaegers vs Kaiju. Not a new idea in the annals ofsci-fi storytelling, but this would be a new approach from agifted filmmaker. As the movie opened, a battle-weary voicebegan describing the world; the breach on the ocean floor,monsters making landfall, tanks, jets, and missiles, citiesdestroyed, lives lost, and the rise of a new weapon.

2013’s Pacific Rim reframed a familiar concept into avisually exciting, emotionally moving joyride. And 2018’sPacific Rim: Uprising showed us the messy aftermathonce the apocalypse was successfully canceled and thecheers had long since faded. What remained was thewrecked landscape, the damaged lives, carcasses of bothmonster and robot being stripped for parts, a profiteeringsubculture, and even a devout Kaiju following. I fell in lovewith those movies for many reasons, but the world-buildingwithin them is what really made an impact. Normalcy tryingto maintain itself amidst grand-scale ruin. The adaptability ofthe human race in shouldering an impossible burden whiletrying to rise above it. We understand that existence.

The durability of a story’s world is essential whenconsidering whether it would have legs as a series. Is theenvironment still interesting without the original plot? Canother characters inhabit it with goals and complications thatare different from the source material? In regard to PacificRim, yes. Yes, it can. But it would take a village of artisans toget us there.

Descriptions on a page created by a solitary mind orthrough passionate collaboration are likely where suchworlds begin, but it isn’t until they evolve within the minds,hearts, and hands of artists that they finally gain form andbecome real. Layer upon layer of exciting ideas is added tothe process until the creation emerges with its own uniqueidentity, one that couldn’t exist if not for every individualwho touched it.

What I love about this book is that it shines a much-deserved klieg light on the magic of its visual art. But italso offers a peek at what goes into creating such a vibrantand fascinating world, as told by the passionate souls whodevoted years to making it happen.

The Art of Pacific Rim: The Black is bursting with visualdelight. Looking through these pages, I feel less like acontributor and more like that breathless movie-going fansettling into his seat, witnessing the unfolding of a worldthat is both mysterious and familiar. If the viewer can believethat such giants roam the same earth we walk on, that thepeople, places, monsters, and robots feel tangible, then theart has done its job. It has made that world real.

GREG JOHNSON(PACIFIC RIM: THE BLACKSHOWRUNNER, EXECUTIVEPRODUCER, AND HEAD WRITER)

Right // Atlas Destroyer may beonly a training Jaeger, but it’sthe hero robot of the series.

6

The Art of PACIFIC RIM: THE BLACK

INTRODUCTION

The invasion began in summer 2013. That was whenLegendary Pictures released the titanic spectacularPacific Rim upon startled cinema audiences. Directedby Guillermo Del Toro, the film showed a world in whichhumanity is threatened by massive beast-monsters, hugeenough to smash cities. They emerge from chasms underthe Pacific Ocean, hence the film’s title. Our defenders areyoung pilots who steer big robots, metal giants as great asthe invaders.

The upshot: earthshaking widescreen slugfests betweenmachines and monstrosities, fighting it out in the oceanwaves or between shattered skyscrapers. The beasts arecalled Kaiju, a Japanese word for ‘monster’. The robots areJaegers, borrowing a German word for ‘hunter’.

The first Pacific Rim film was a hit, leading to acinema sequel in 2018, Pacific Rim: Uprising. Directedby Steven S. DeKnight, the second film continued theKaiju-Jaeger conflict ten years further on, with mostly newcharacters. However, the third screen iteration of Pacific

Rim wouldn’t be a cinema film. Rather it would be anonline animated series, streamed internationally by Netflixfrom 2021. Called Pacific Rim: The Black, it’s set in theworld established by the live-action films (chronologicallythe series is set some time after Pacific Rim: Uprising).However, this series tells a different kind of story from thefilms, and it takes a new perspective.

Whereas the earlier films featured soldiers trained tofight the Kaiju, the animated series focuses on children lefton the battlefield. This particular battlefield is a ruined,post-civilization Australia (the ‘Black’ of the title), whereKaiju prowl unchallenged. Two of the children are a brotherand sister, whose missing parents were Jaeger pilots. Thesiblings discover a third child, a mute boy in a laboratorytank whose origin is a mystery. Together, they’ll learn thatwhile Australia is roamed by monsters of all shapes andsizes—the show’s bestiary of Kaiju goes far beyond theoriginal films—the children’s most dangerous enemy maybe human.

Left // Our first sight of AtlasDestroyer, sealed undergrounduntil its inadvertent discovery inEpisode One.

Below // The child protagonistsof Pacific Rim: The Black are farremoved from the pro pilots ofthe Pacific Rim films.

Introduction

9

It’s a new path for the Pacific Rim franchise, stemmingfrom a pitch presented to Legendary Pictures by GregJohnson and Craig Kyle. They would be the showrunnerson Pacific Rim: The Black. Both have decades of experiencein screen fantasy. Among other things, Johnson wrote theanimated film adaptation of Planet Hulk, while Kyle was oneof the writers on the live-action Marvel film Thor: Ragnarok.They teamed up to pitch one of several competingproposals for a Pacific Rim animated series.

Johnson stresses how he and Kyle felt that the seriesneeded to be different from the films. “When Craig andI discussed partnering on a Pacific Rim idea to pitchto Legendary,” Johnson says, “we first defined whatwe shouldn’t do. And that was to present a series thatdepended on constant Kaiju and Jaeger battles in denselypopulated cities. One: it would cease to be interestingaround the third episode. And two: it would be prohibitivelyexpensive, even in animation.”

Johnson and Kyle ruled out other approaches; forexample, a Pacific Rim show about rookie Jaeger cadetslearning the ropes within the PPDC, the military organizationseen in the films (something like a Jaeger Junior High). Thewriters suspected some of the rival pitches would take thatapproach. “Not that it’s a bad idea,” Johnson says, “but we’dkind of seen it in the second movie.” In Pacific Rim: Uprising,cadets are being trained at a pilot academy in China.

Instead, the writers wanted to make their own spacein the franchise, one that wouldn’t tread on the toes ofpotential future Pacific Rim stories. “Craig and I liked theidea of answering the question; what would happen if theKaiju won?” Johnson says. “We couldn’t do that worldwide,but we could do it on a continent that could be severedfrom the rest of the world. Australia fit perfectly.”

With the standalone setting decided, who should theprotagonists be? Johnson and Kyle began developing theirleads, a teen brother and sister called Taylor and Hayley.

Above // The city battle which opens the first episode would betypical in the films, but not in the series.

10

The Art of PACIFIC RIM: THE BLACK

“They have enough emotional baggage to make our journeywith them worth sticking around for,” Johnson says. “Guilt,responsibility, uncertainty, desperation and love... They allbecome exposed.”

Taylor and Hayley are the viewers’ surrogates. “Thesiblings would serve as the eyes of the audience as they setout into unknown territory that’s been under the control ofKaiju for five years,” says Johnson. “We knew instinctivelythat our characters needed to be on the move for this series,trying to get out, trying to find answers about their missingparents. The stories needed momentum to drive us forward.As such, the series became what is termed a road picture.”

Several reviewers describe Pacific Rim: The Black asmore “serious” than the films. While the characters in thePacific Rim movies face anguish and tragedy, the films tendto be upbeat and triumphalist. One of the first film’s best-remembered lines, delivered by the patriarchal commanderplayed by Idris Elba, is, “We are cancelling the apocalypse!”That wasn’t what Johnson and Kyle wanted. “The conceptof the series really dictated the tone,” Johnson says. “Themovies were more about what it takes to fight back and win.This series is not about winning, it’s about surviving.”

THE JAPANESE CONNECTION

Ken Duer is the co-producer of Pacific Rim: The Black.He has decades of experience in adapting properties toanimation, ranging from his work on the 1980s cartoon TheReal Ghostbusters to handling superhero titles. He says, “Ithink with any existing property, especially the successfulones like Pacific Rim, you don’t want to do anything thatwould turn off the fans.”

However, Duer agrees with Johnson that Pacific Rim:The Black had to take the franchise in a new direction. “Ithink inside Legendary, they were thinking how we couldrevive Pacific Rim, and bring in new fans and do spinoffs.Legendary made the right decision, I think, and they werevery accommodating of the ideas from Greg and Craig.”

The Pacific Rim films were new spins on a genreimported from Japan. “The ‘Kaiju’ monster genre has beenaround in Japan for years and years,” Duer says, “and thenPacific Rim came out with its own way to handle the Kaiju.We wanted to do something different that would bring thePacific Rim property forward into the future, bringing in notjust the established fans, but also bringing new fans intothis genre.”

Right // Much of the final series revolves around a trioof characters, but the early concept sketches suggesteda four-strong team.

14

The Art of PACIFIC RIM: THE BLACK

Japan has made giant monsters for decades. You can goback to the first Godzilla live-action film in 1954, a responseto the horrors of World War II. Since then, there have beenscores of Japanese monster films for successive generations,as well as TV series. But many of these spectacles didn’tjust have giant monsters. They also had giant-sized heroesfighting the monsters and other menaces to save humanity.

Not all these saviors were mechanical. The live-actionUltraman, who stomped across Japanese TV screens in1966, was a red-and-white-suited giant superhero, a comboof human and alien. But many of these monster-fightertitans were robots, often created in animation. Talking

about his inspirations for Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Torocited Ultraman and its sequel Ultraseven. But he also talkedabout giant robot anime such as 1963’s Tetsujin-28 (calledGigantor in America), and 1972’s Mazinger Z.

These shows were made when Japan’s burgeoninganimation was little-known internationally. Often, theJapanese origins of cartoon exports were hidden in foreignterritories. Of course, by the time Pacific Rim opened in2013, all that had changed. Anime had fans worldwide, andmultinational corporations were looking to invest.

A year after Pacific Rim’s release, in 2014, Netflixstreamed a Japan-animated space opera called Knights of

“WE WANTED TO DOSOMETHING DIFFERENT THATWOULD BRING THE PACIFIC RIMPROPERTY FORWARDINTO THE FUTURE.”

Ken Duer, co-producer

Introduction

15

Sidonia. Tagged as a “Netflix Original Anime”, it was theplatform’s first investment of that kind. It was made by thestudio Polygon Pictures, which would make Pacific Rim: TheBlack