As we wrote about earlier this month, a new Fruits Basket anime is being produced, but at the time details were pretty scarce. Christmas might be coming a little early this year because, boy, did we get a lot of details on the upcoming anime!
So far, we have learned that the new show will cover the entire manga storyline, which is a big change from the original. Yoshihide Ibata, of FLCL Progressive, will be directing the show.
We’ve been given the first four Japanese cast members who play the most recurring characters:
- Manaka Iwami (Tsuki ga Kirei’s Aira Miyamoto, Maquia’s titular character, Tada Never Falls in Love’s Teresa Wagner) as Tohru Honda
- Nobunaga Shimazaki (Waiting in the Summer’s Kaito, Date A Live’s Shido Itsuka, Scum’s Wish’s Mugi) as Yuki Sohma
- Yūma Uchida (Macross Delta’s Hayate Immelmann, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans’ Ein Dalton, Banana Fish’s Ash Lynx) as Kyo Sohma
- Yūichi Nakamura (Fairy Tail’s Gray Fullbuster, The irregular at magic high school’s Tatsuya Chiba, JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: Golden Wind’s Bruno Bucciarati) as Shigure Sohma
Two new visuals we given for the show, giving us a peek at the style of animation we can expect:
But perhaps most excitingly and surprisingly of all, we got a comment from Fruits Basket creator, Natsuki Takaya, about the anime, which was posted on Funimation’s website:
I never once felt negatively about the project or thought that I didn’t want to do it, but still, my first thought was “What?!” (lol)
So, I made several requests right off the bat.
One of those was to do it with a completely new team.
Completely new. Every single person.
I told [the producers], if you want to open the curtain again, then please make it all new. Please rebuild the Furuba world from scratch, with new everything.
Another request was to not make the art look too much like my art.
This was partly because my Furuba art is old now, pure and simple, and also largely because I was in poor health back then (you can find more details about that in the afterword to the Collector’s Edition, if you’re curious), so my drawing was awfully shaky. Because of that, I wanted them to rebuild the art as well.
Other than that… Well, it was a mix. On some things I gave them detailed thoughts, and on others I gave them my blessing to do as they liked.
The production staff promptly accepted my requests and worked to meet them, and I’m truly grateful to them all. Thank you again.
They also readily gave me permission to visit the recording sessions sometimes, which makes me so happy. I don’t actually do anything there; I’m just an observer. (Really, I don’t do anything.)
It’s a pure delight, getting to see the reels a little early like that.
Fruits Basket is set to run in Japan sometime in 2019 on TV Tokyo, and will be streamed on FunimationNow.
