This is Niche Culture. In this column, we regularly cover anime, geek culture, and things related to video games. Please leave feedback and let us know if there’s something you want us to cover!

Manga creator and anime legend Katsuhiro Otomo has announced his next movie at this year’s Anime Expo – Orbital Era.

The feature length anime film is being produced by Sunrise, and is Otomo’s third feature film after Akira and Steamboy. Production is already underway, and the key visual has already been shown off:

While details are scant, the film is set in a science fiction world, in a space colony. The plot focuses on a coming-of-age story with some youngsters that live on the colony, over the course of the four seasons in the year.

Otomo is directing, as well as responsible for the original screenplay, design, and work on the film. Motoki Mukaichi is producing with the Japanese film distributor Shochiku. In the Anime Expo panel, Mukaichi noted the irony in the fact that the protagonist is American, but in the first key art he’s wearing a helmet with the CCCP logo from the Soviet Union.

Otomo noted that despite the fact that the story is set in the future, instead of it being rooted in actual science, the film has more of a science fantasy element to it.

Here’s the official blurb from Sunrise:

The plot takes place in the near-future on a space colony under construction. It is an action-adventure story following the lives of some young boys surviving in this peculiar environment and society as they are tossed around by fate. “The reality found in mankind’s future” will be depicted through their perspective.

An official premiere date for Orbital Era wasn’t confirmed.