Altered Carbon’s second season premiered recently on Netflix. My review will be going up here on BMD later today, and as a total coincidence, Netflix elected to choose today to release the trailer for the cyberpunk show's anime movie spinoff, Altered Carbon: Resleeved. That makes our publishing schedule look a little awkward, but them’s the breaks.
Resleeved comes to us from Cowboy Bebop screenwriter Dai Satō, and tells a self-contained tale about series protagonist Takeshi Kovacs, presumably in a time prior to the most recent season of the show. Set on the planet Latimer, the story will see Kovacs “protect a tattoo artist while investigating the death of a yakuza boss alongside a no-nonsense CTAC,” according to Netflix. Here’s the trailer you clicked in for:
This series has flirted with Japanese culture and imagery before, but Resleeved unsurprisingly pushes that into a full-on cyberpunk yakuza milieu. It’s hard to tell how the story will play out, but it’ll definitely do so with lots of swords, gunplay, and blood, as is traditional with this series. The art style is unique and dynamic, mixing 3D animation with an anime style, and given my fondness for the IP in question, I’ll certainly be checking this out. Not that we'll ever see the data on it, but it’ll be interesting to see how this performs, because Netflix refers to an “expanded universe” in the trailer description. Maybe someday that universe will expand beyond Takeshi Kovacs.
Altered Carbon: Resleeved releases March 19th on Netflix.