Now to make you hate me. Ring ring ring ring ring, Banana fish!
Earlier today, a website opened its doors to announce that Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish will receive an anime adaptation. The series, which is being produced as part of a celebration of Yoshida’s 40th anniversary in the industry, will air on the Noitamina programming block next year.
Before you ask: This one’s going to Amazon, who holds the streaming rights to all Noitamina programs for the forseeable future.
The site includes a teaser trailer, which you can check out below:
The text roughly translates to:
Akimi Yoshida’s 40th Anniversary Project
The Manga Masterpiece will finally be adapted for the small screen!
Banana Fish
Creator: Umimachi Diary’s Akimi Yoshida (Shogakukan’s Flower Comics Label)
Director: Hiroko Utsumi (Free!)
Series Script Supervisor: Hiroshi Seko (Inuyashiki)
Character Design: Akemi Hayashi (Doukyusei -Classmates-)
Animation Production: MAPPA (Yuri!!! on Ice)
Anime adaptation in production for Fuji TV’s “Noitamina” and elsewhere in 2018
A teaser visual was also released, which we’ve provided below.
Banana Fish will be directed by Hiroko Utsumi (Free!) at MAPPA, with Akemi Hayashi (Fruits Basket, Peacemaker) providing character designs. Hiroshi Seko (Inuyashiki Last Hero, Ajin: Demi-Human) is in charge of series composition for the project.
Akimi Yoshida’s Banana Fish manga launchd in the pages of Shogakukan’s Bessatsu Shōjo Comic magazine in 1985. The series, which ran through 1994, spanned 19 volumes in Japan. Despite its long run and relative popularity, the series never received an anime adaptation. Rather, it inspired numeorus stage plays.
Viz Media held the rights to the Banana Fish manga, which they first distributed in their (now defunct) Pulp magazine. They describe the series as:
Vice City: New York in the 80s… Nature made Ash Lynx beautiful; nurture made him a cold ruthless killer. A child runaway brought up as the adopted heir, hatchet man, and sex toy of “Papa” Dino Golzine, the East Coast’s Corsican crime lord, Ash is now at the rebellious age of seventeen – forsaking the kingdom of power and riches held out by the devil who raised him, preferring a code he can live with among a small but loyal gang of street thugs. But his “Papa” can’t simply let him go – not when the hideous secret that drove Ash’s older brother mad in Vietnam has suddenly fallen into his insatiably ambitious hands.
Source: Comic Natalie
