‘All It Takes To Kill’ Director Feels Set To Tackle Anime Adaptation Of Sci-Fi Epic’s ‘Perfect’

All You Need To Kill may sound like a new in-your-face anime movie brought to the US by GKids from the movie franchise, but for those in the know, the movie is actually the latest in a long line of adaptations of its source material.

Undoubtedly, the most popular adaptation here is the cult of Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt a sci-fi movie Die Again Die Againalso known as The Limit of Tomorrow. However, its roots go back much further than the Hollywood flick. Originally a 2003 novel by Hiroshi Sakurazaka, it was adapted into a manga by Ryosuke Takeuchi and drawn by. Death Note singer Takeshi Obata. Actually, it’s a clue to a new normal in anime is a bit backwards, at least in the traditional anime industry standards.

It follows Keiji, a foot soldier in Earth’s quest to repel an alien species, our only means of, surprisingly, smart suits to kill the invading hordes. When he dies prematurely, Keiji finds himself trapped in a time loop that repeats the day, his only way out depends on finding a way to break free. But he is not alone. Along with him is humanity’s strongest soldier, Rita, who is bound in a death loop that restarts whenever one of them dies, and fights (with a giant cyber ax) by Keiji’s side to get out of purgatory and win the war once and for all.

As with any project that has the word “adaptation” attached, the diehard fandom has high hopes while also having doubts about seeing their child brought to life again by Studio 4°C. (Children of the Sea). However, while the fans’ apathy is not lost on Studio 4°C’s Kenichiro Akimoto, the director sat down with io9 to discuss why he felt compelled to put his first hand into breathing new life into the acclaimed series.

Anyway All You Need To Kill being Akimoto’s first time in the director’s chair—his debut includes serving as a CG artist for Berserk: The Golden Age Arc trilogy and as a CGI director for Netflix’s Children of the Sea– to him, to take All You Need To Kill boiled down to fate and a “good” time.

“I was just talking to our president, [Eiko] Tanaka, about helping the project. And at the same time, Warner Bros. put together a proposal for All You Need To Kill animation project,” Akimoto said. “It just happened to all work together at the right time.”

Time-loop stories often deal with trauma, memory, and identity—and, in the case of life simulation, All You Need To KillThe fandom felt its own version of that cycle, divided between purists and those who left the series’ life as the most popular and adapted legend. So when Studio 4 ° C stabs at rethinking All You Need To Kill sure to be a novel for many who flock to theaters, it faces an uphill battle with its diehards, whose community remains divided between pessimistic fans and cautious hopefuls who are waiting to see how the story will turn out.

After all, even by Akimoto’s own estimation, the quality of the original novel is “perfect and very perfect,” while the live-action Hollywood film, taking its concept differently, was “still very exciting.” The most obvious change in Akimoto’s adaptation of the story is that it follows Rita instead of Keiji, a first for the series, and adds more texture to the hero by making his backstory go beyond the tough exterior that Keiji and fans encounter in other adaptations. For Akimoto, this change helped Studio 4°C create a brand new one All You Need To Kill adapt to the conditions that are appropriate to stand close to the previous conditions.

“When I was put in charge of animation, I wanted to look at it as a challenge to have our originality in the work itself. And I know as a fan, I would have felt the same way, like, ‘Wait, please don’t change it.’ But at the same time, I also wanted to do something different. That is why this is the way we have taken it.”

Given that Studio 4°C’s film is All You Need To KillFor the third adaptation, Akimoto understood that it would invite comparison. Still, his hope is that the movie will not only be true to the title’s name, both thematically and in its 3DCG action, but also capture the beauty of its dystopian sci-fi world through animation alone.

“I wanted to show something positive within the story,” he said, noting in particular how important Keiji and Rita are to each other despite the unexpected circumstances of their first meeting. “Although the story and concept are the same, I wanted everyone to experience a different kind of entertainment.”

Another way the film is different All You Need To KillAnother adaptation is its provocative art style. Compared to the dark, manga look and template-leaning sci-fi look of 2010s Hollywood (see Elysium again Region 9), Studio 4°C’s aesthetic feels like a surprising, moving juxtaposition—where character models and background art are pastel, precise, and clean, yet also poorly drawn and wonderfully scripted. It’s like the expansive yet kinetic action of ’90s anime Crayon Shin-chan is set smack dab in the middle of a 2D-meets-3DCG sci-fi action thriller. A sentence that goes a long way for anime fans in the know.

“All You Need Is Kill” movie + art book (Studio 4°C) is coming this Friday in Japan.
Works of art >> pic.twitter.com/aZJoHhmzM8

– Catsuka (@catsuka) January 7, 2026

About All You Need To KillAkimoto’s beautiful appearance, he praised the character designer Izumi Murakami for cooking a bit of the beauty of the anime film. In addition to serving as Akimoto’s directorial debut, the film also marked Murakami’s debut as a character designer. Although Akimoto admitted that he gave him rough ideas of what he thought Rita would look like early in the film’s development, the visual palette All You Need To Kill the audience that will see it in the theaters is far from the original proposals he made. Which, in Akimoto’s estimation, was better.

“Murakami took a lot of inspiration from movie characters, and drew us different concept art. At first, Rita’s character design was very photorealistic,” he said. “But as he worked on it, it felt like it was starting to flatten out. That’s what I love most about the design. As Murakami was working on the drawings by himself, he started to get the idea of ​​Rita his mind. And so his design came to be.”

From there, Akimoto says he didn’t have to send many requests or changes to Murakami as long as his unique, stylish identity as Rita entered All You Need To Kill. He says, the visual tone was very important in combining Studio 4 ° C’s attractive 3D charm – a rarity that is hard to find in an industry where CG is often the whipping boy, considered something that has never been encountered by anime fans except for a few rare studios.

“The flatness of the character design is very important in my film, because these flat characters will be reduced to this 3DCG animation background. If the characters are more realistic, then the contrast can be more extreme. So I wanted to challenge myself to create this kind of flat animation style, and that’s how it happened.”

All You Need To Kill will hit theaters on January 16.

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