It’s a battle of the exes like you’ve never seen before in the first full look at Scott Pilgrim Takes Off, the new anime series from Netflix.
The two-minute teaser for the show, created for television by executive producers and co-showrunners Bryan Lee O’Malley and BenDavid Grabinski, debuted during New York Comic Con on Saturday. As part of the hour-long panel, O’Malley and Grabinski not only presented the trailer and teased the series, but confirmed that Julian Cihi will voice the Katayanagi Twins (Kyle and Ken).
The trailer takes fans back to Toronto “not too long ago” as Scott asks out Ramona Flowers, the “girl of my dreams.” But in order to date her, Scott must defeat her “seven evil exes.” Electric battles and even more electric guitar riffs set up a new chapter in the Scott Pilgrim saga, which sees the return of the live-action cast as their respective characters.
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That includes Cera as Scott, Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Ramona, Satya Bhabha (Matthew Patel), Kieran Culkin (Wallace Wells), Chris Evans (Lucas Lee), Anna Kendrick (Stacey Pilgrim), Brie Larson (Envy Adams), Alison Pill (Kim Pine), Aubrey Plaza (Julie Powers), Brandon Routh (Todd Ingram), Jason Schwartzman (Gideon Graves), Johnny Simmons (Young Neil), Mark Webber (Stephen Stills), Mae Whitman (Roxie Richter) and Ellen Wong (Knives Chau).
The series comes nearly 20 years after the beloved graphic novel and 13 years after the movie, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the panel, O’Malley and Grabinski spoke to the advantages of having Scott’s stories in two different mediums to help guide this iteration.
“The thing that was really helpful, I think, is because the book exists and the movie exists. There was some sort of visual language that is a starting point already. I think that if you’re writing scripts that weren’t based on anything that didn’t have like pre-existing characters and designs, it might have been a very big challenge,” Grabinski said. “The thing that was helpful is that [Science] SARU were experts on the books. They knew every drawing Bryan had ever done better than he knew himself, and found a way to try to translate his style into something that was more palatable for them.”
“The short answer is we didn’t have to do hardly anything because they were just all over it. They knew exactly what to do. It was really like a collaboration,” O’Malley added.
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World director, co-writer and producer Edgar Wright serves as executive producer alongside Marc Platt, Jared LeBoff, Adam Siegel, Michael Bacall and Eunyoung Choi on the anime series. Award-winning animation house Science SARU, and UCP, a division of Universal Studio Group, produce for Netflix.
The series begins streaming on Netflix Nov. 17.
