Adi Shankar Promises The Devil May Cry Anime Is Coming Along Nicely

It seemed like only yesterday that video games were considered impossible to adapt well and, while the consensus is still muddy on live-action adaptations, animation seems to be the overlooked remedy. Adi Shankar certainly agrees, being one of many creatives at the forefront of a new wave in adult Western animation, and he has high hopes for his upcoming Devil May Cry anime.

The adaptation of Capcom’s popular hack-and-slash action series was first announced back in 2018 in an interview with IGN that was very peculiar but very on-brand for Shankar. Then, there was a lot of radio silence while the show that arguably allowed Devil May Cry‘s anime to exist in the first place – Castlevania – carried on, but the silence finally ended recently.

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Just A Tease

DMC‘s first teaser was unveiled during Netflix’s DROP 01 event on September 27, 2023, a showcase of animated projects coming to the streaming platform. Not only was the first footage shown, featuring Dante flipping around, guns blazing, in his typical manner, but the team animating the series was revealed to be none other than South Korea’s Studio Mir.

Mir is famous for their work on The Legend of Korra as well as Netflix’s Voltron: Legendary Defender, though in recent years, their portfolio has only grown larger. From their impeccable original animated film The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf to their contribution to Season 2 of Star Wars: Visions, their style and techniques have become known the world over.

It’s this consistent and dazzling resume that made the studio a no-brainer in Shankar’s mind, something he made clear in a recent featurette during Netflix Geeked Week ’23. In this short sit down with the executive producer, showrunner, and creator of the new series, he gives an update on the status of the production, sharing some in-progress animation. Additionally, he offers some insight into the aims of the project, which are ambitious, to say the least.

Not Just Another Anime

Adi Shankar wants to create not only a good animated series and not only a good Devil May Cry adaptation, but one of the best shows on Netflix in general. It’s quite a lofty goal, especially on a platform like Netflix, where the selection of animated originals is always growing and stacked with some heavy competition, one of the biggest being 2021’s Arcane.

We’ve been working on this show every day since 2018. Our goal wasn’t just to pump out another animated show. My goal is to make one of the best shows on the Netflix platform, period.

-Adi Shankar, Netflix Geeked Week ’23, November 11, 2023

Alex Larsen is writing the series and has collaborated with Shankar just recently as a writer on Captain Laserhawk: A Blood Dragon Remix, where he wrote three episodes. He also penned four episodes of 2021’s Yasuke by studio MAPPA and director LeSean Thomas, and he wrote the 2017 comedy/drama film Bodied. Of all of his credited works, the insanity that was Laserhawk is likely the closest insight into what audiences can expect from his work on DMC.

Producers tend to make hefty promises like these, but there’s an appreciable level of honesty to be intuited from Shankar’s update. After all, he’s not often a man of subtlety when it comes to the press surrounding his works. This is the man who did a photoshoot as Dante as part of the anime’s announcement years back, and who generally appears in interviews in wacky costumes of varying levels of quality, to great comedic effect.

Compared to something like how he unveiled Captain Laserhawk during Ubisoft Forward 2023, his featurette on Devil May Cry seems a lot more tame – as much as can be expected at least. The goal of this update was to further put fears about the project being in limbo to rest. Furthermore, if the short teaser from September wasn’t enough, Shankar’s sincere message to fans seems to have the aim of assuring them that this project is in the right hands.

As a producer, he has always branded himself as a die-hard fan of the projects he gets involved with. This portrayal does a lot to set him apart from the typical image of producers who tend to mess up adaptations like these – the “jabronis in Hollywood” as he referred to them in 2018. It’s too early to tell if the Devil May Cry anime will live up to the hype, but there’s definitely more hype now than there was before.

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Source: IGN, Netflix Official YouTube Channel