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What If the Samurai Era Lasted in Japan Until 2026? – World Premiere of a Scene from the Theatrical Anime KILLTUBE!

KILLTUBE is an audacious work. It's bold in its confidence. It's pure in its artist-first approach. But when it's finally complete in 2026 – when CHOCOLATE Inc. says it will be done – will it be any good?

Anime Expo attendees filed into the Crunchyroll Stage in the Platinum Ballroom for the look behind the scenes to hit the public eye since they dropped the “pilot for the feature film” on YouTube last year. That 1-minute clip has over 650,000 views as of this writing, so no one can deny that it's grabbed people's attention.

After the panel's MC, Ian, whipped up the crowd a little bit, he introduced the panel guests: the film's director Kazuaki Kuribayashi, and the animation producer Fuko Noda. Both guests launch straight into their prepared remarks, buzzing with excitement.

Kuribayashi describes the basic pitch for the film. KILLTUBE takes place in an alternate Japan where the Edo period never ended, Japan remained largely closed off to the outside world, and samurai still exist. Industrial and technological progress continued, resulting in a world that blends traditional Japanese culture and imagery with modern-day things like skyscrapers and live-streaming.

This alternate-future Japan has been stratified into seven social ranks, and the only way to climb up these ranks is to live-stream a duel on KILLTUBE and increase your following.

The story follows a boy named Musashi, who was raised by dogs, and doesn't care about rules or social norms. His pants are frequently sagging extremely low. He starts at the bottom of the social ranks at level one, and dives into the world of duels to rise up and challenge the system.

Joining the story is Kikuchiyo, who Kuribayashi describes being "like a K-Pop star on the outside, but inside he's a sneaky genius con artist." And also Leo, a genius inventor "who believes she's the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci." And at the top of the dueling streamer food chain are characters collectively known as “K7,” inspired by One Piece's Seven Warlords of the Sea.

They shared an exclusive in-progress preview, showing off an unfinished animation sequence: We're seeing more and more animation projects take big swings with their visual direction, and KILLTUBE is no exception. When Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse splashed onto the scene in 2018 to critical and commercial success, it made waves for its innovative blending of animation styles, and its influence is apparent here too.

There have been plenty of anime that have pushed the envelope, but with KILLTUBE, there's a sense that CHOCOLATE Inc. realized they could pull out all the stops and go for it. They could really let loose and have creative inspiration guide them.

In our interview with Kuribayashi in October of last year), he was extremely frank about the team's lack of experience, and how they're learning so much as they go. It's important to approach such an undertaking with that kind of humility and openness to growth. But it certainly does make one worry about the end result.

Animation Producer Fuko Noda added her perspective to the conversation as well. “It's definitely beyond tough working on this project,” she told the audience. “The team has such an ambitious vision for this project.”

She shares that the team is taking an unorthodox approach to production. “For this project, we're actually not following the usual top down production model. Instead, we're building the project bottom up, which is based on the creativity and ideas of the team.”

As an example, they said sometimes a CG animator would come up with an idea, or want to experiment with a certain kind of movement, which will then evolve into a new direction for the scene. There are also instances where concept art will inspire changes to the story itself.

Noda is adamant that it's all worth it. “It's definitely tough, but I believe that this kind of creative freedom leads to surprises you could never get if everything were slowly planned from the start.”

With a first-time director, an artist-first approach to production, and over 100 staff members experimenting and contributing concepts to every little aspect, Noda definitely has her work cut out for her. They shared an example of a drone in the world of KILLTUBE, for which they had 50+ concepts from a large pool of artists.

One can't help but wonder about the wasted effort. Wouldn't it be more efficient to have a small, focused team of artists handle concepts for something like that? With their “bottom-up” approach, it's perhaps unsurprising that it's taking them this long to complete the film.

The clip they've been showing off has a sequence where main character Musashi jumps off a rooftop on his skateboard. Musashi and the background are all CG, but the stylized visual effects flowing from underneath his board are hand drawn.

That's cool! And it looks awesome! What's novel about it isn't that it combines 2D and 3D – we've seen that before. Both Spider-Verse and Arcane used the technique with great results.On that level, KILLTUBE is not so different from those two works.

No, what separates them is KILLTUBE's setting, characters, and influences, which are all positively DRIPPING with uniquely Japanese elements. There's plenty of western hip hop and street style influences too, with the main character skateboarding past tons of graffiti set to a hip hop soundtrack. What makes it so unique is that they've chosen to embrace the Japanese-ness of it all, and they are leaning in hard.

The panel held a “KILLTUBE QUIZ” to share some fun Japanese trivia, like how 300 years ago, the site of the famous Shibuya crosswalk was a river where farmers would wash rice. It served as a way to show that every bit of the KILLTUBE world is inspired in some way by something from Japanese mythology or real-world history.

They then took a moment to announce the voice cast of the main three characters. Kikuchiyo will be played by Kengo Kawanishi, Leo will be played by Ayane Sakura, and the main character, Musashi, will be played by Yui Tsukada. The showed off some special visuals for the announcement, for which they commissioned a graffiti artist from New York.

As the panel was nearing the end, the host asked one last question: Are they okay on budget? In ANN's previous interview with him, Kuribayashi said their budget for KILLTUBE was 1 billion yen (~US$6.68 million at the time). When asked at the panel, in another moment of surprising candor, Kuribayashi said they don't have enough. You could feel a slight nervousness in the room, but he pressed on unfazed.

What's one way they're dealing with the budget shortfall? They're launching a website they're calling the "KILLTUBE Backers' Store" where they're selling things you would see sold as the upper-most tiers of a crowd-funding campaign.

It's already live here.

Despite adopting the same nomenclature, it's not a crowd-funding campaign at all. There's no outward-facing funding goal to reach that will assure contributors of success. There's no campaign page breaking down how the money is being spent or professing that the project might not happen without fans' support.

The three "rewards" – to adopt the crowd-funding campaign framing – available at the time of writing include having your name in the credits in stylized Japanese calligraphy, a KILLTUBE poster with your likeness drawn in, and the opportunity to show up as a KILLTUBE background character.

The cost of being included in the end-credits is $100. Being adapted in the KILLTUBE style on a poster and appearing as a background character are an eye-popping $15,000 and $20,000 respectively.

Despite the production woes, it sounds like the team is having an absolute blast making the film, and that's important for keeping the passion burning. In an age where AI is seeping into the art world in so many ways, it's great to see a creative project dedicate itself so fully to an artist-driven process.

We'll have to hope that Kuribayashi and the team CHOCOLATE Inc. can put all of the puzzle pieces together and make a compelling film out of it.

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ANN's coverage of Anime Expo 2025 is sponsored by Yen Press and Ize Press!