Creative Intelligence Arts, the guys behind the successfully funded Project Phoenix Kickstarter, are back on the crowdfunding platform for a pretty different pitch.
This time, they’ve teamed up with anime industry legend Masahiro Ando (Sword of the Stranger, Blast of Tempest, Canaan) and a staff rounded out with both game and anime veterans.
Curiously, the person behind penning the story is none other than Jiro Ishii, producer on the cult hit Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; and more recently Level-5’s Playstation Vita and 3DS adventure game, Time Travelers, which has yet to be released.
You can get a taste of the anime itself in the video featured above. The Kickstarter itself is for a single, high production quality episode set within a world that Ishii himself has been wanting to produce for a long time.
The story within Under the Dog is set in a near future Tokyo, specifically in the year 2025, following a five year long catastrophe lead by a group of physically enhanced terrorists, which began at the 2020 Olympics.
To combat future terrorist attacks by individuals with special powers, the United Nations creates a covert branch to assemble task forces of equally gifted individuals. The headquarters of this organization is – you guessed it, the Bayside Special District of Tokyo.
The goal of this special task force is to find anyone with even a remote resemblance to the original terrorists, and taking them out. As a cover for their operations, the International School for Boys and Girls was opened.
This school was not only a front for the cover operation, but also an avenue for them to recruit gifted high schoolers as they came of age – before they could turn to a life of crime and destruction.
The organization coerces them into service by threatening to kill their families, should they fail or refuse to join the cause. To ensure their cooperation, each of the students have all of their family members outfitted with a tiny bomb within each of their skulls.
Coming from this, all of their speech and actions are closely monitored and recorded through a chip that is embedded in their brains. If a commanding officer at the UN decides that an agent has gone astray, they press a button and poof – their family is gone.
Should the Kickstarter be funded, the team is looking to make the following rewards available to backers:
- A professionally executed 24 minute anime episode full of awesome
- Top notch Japanese Voice-Over
- English subtitles
- Behind the scenes development diaries and interviews
- An original soundtrack
Creative Intelligence Assembly is looking for $580,000 dollars to make this happen – and if they meet some of their loftier stretch goals, they can even expand upon the dream that Ishii-san has.
If you want to back Under the Dog, head on over to their Kickstarter page.
