To keep us all keen for Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner sequel Blade Runner 2049, Admired anime director Shinichiro Watanabe has produced a short film that spans all of 15 minutes, titled Blade Runner Black Out 2022.

Running with Villeneuve’s vision for the upcoming feature-film featuring Ryan Gosling and Harrison Ford, Watanabe’s animated piece is set 15 years after the initial film, intended to bridge the gap between the original Blade Runner and the sequel Blade Runner 2049.

Parallel to Watanabe’s other work, Samurai Champloo and Cowboy Bebop, the short film delivers an anime aesthetic in order to sensationalise some of the key events that occurred after 2019, when Ridley Scott’s original movie took place.

Clean off the set of his own film “Kuso”, Flying Lotus has been cherry-picked to craft the score for this and inventive and intense short. You can stream the entire anime short via Crunchyroll here.

Watch the official preview below.

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