Set against the backdrop of 1990s Tokyo, Netflix’s new animated series dives deep into the fears, wonders, and spirituality of AI and humanoid robotics, blending horror, history, and canon in the ‘Terminator’ franchise’s first anime; the Skydance Animation and Production I.G show debuts August 29.
The year was 1970, and four laboratories in the School of Science & Engineering of Tokyo’s Waseda University banded together to set up "The Bio-engineering group," which started the “WABOT project.” Three years later, the first attempt at building a humanoid robot was successful. Given the name Wabot-1, the university’s robot was the first full-scale anthropomorphic robot developed in the world. It consisted of a limb-control system, a vision system and a conversation system. The WABOT-1 was able to communicate with a person in Japanese and to measure distances and directions to objects using external receptors, artificial ears and eyes, and an artificial mouth.
In 1980, Waseda’s joint project produced WABOT-2, which was able to converse with a person, read a normal musical score with its eye and play tunes of average difficulty on an electronic organ. The WABOT-2 could also accompany a person while listening to someone sing. The WABOT-2 represented the first milestone in developing a "personal robot" and ushered in the “age of robotics” in Japan.
Netflix’s Terminator Zero, which streams globally on Netflix starting Thursday, August 29, takes place in 1997 Japan, where robots serve as grocery store attendants. And the scene is not too far off from reality.
“In Japan from the late 80s to the late 90s, car maker Honda had developed this robot called ASIMO,” shares the animated series director Masashi Kudō. “It’s not as developed as 1NNO in the show, but they were close. Japanese robots tend to be designed to look nice and sweet and have this rounder figure that’s friendly. It’s very different than what most Western people associate with robots. Americans tend to think of them being more realistic and like how humans look. But our robots, even now, tend to look funny and cute. So, when we were designing the robots in the show, we wanted to show that contrast and juxtapose the Terminator and robots like 1NNO.”
Terminator Zero, the first anime installment in the Terminator franchise, follows a soldier, caught between the future (2022) and the past, after being sent back in time to change the fate of humanity. She arrives in 1997 to protect a scientist named Malcolm Lee, who’s working to launch a new AI system designed to compete with Skynet’s impending attack on humanity. As Malcolm navigates the moral complexities of his creation, he is hunted by an unrelenting assassin from the future that forever alters the fate of his three children.
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Mattson Tomlin (Project Power, The Batman) serves as writer, showrunner and executive producer, while Kudō directs. David Ellison, Dana Goldberg, and Don Granger executive produce for Skydance. The project is produced and animated in partnership with Production I.G (Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045, B: The Beginning). Skydance executive produces.
“When I got the job, Netflix was already involved, Production I.G was already involved, and it was already decided that this would be an animated series,” says Tomlin. “The ask was, ‘We need there to be some kind of Japanese component.’ They didn't say it had to take place in Japan. They were soft-pitching having a Japanese character somewhere in the show. I was the one that was like, ‘No, you're all going to be animating this in Tokyo. Let's take advantage of the fact that you are there and are going to make a much more vivid, realized, animated version of Tokyo than of Los Angeles in 1997.’”
While Tomlin was just a young boy living State-side in the 90s, he says he vividly remembers watching 60 Minutes specials where they introduced Japan’s evolving robotics.
“I can remember news about Japan from back then and, in fact, at one point, I mentioned to the team at Production I.G that on 60 Minutes they did this piece about a humanoid robot that you could type in what it would say,” remembers Tomlin. “And it was kind of this horrifying, skeletal woman's rubber face. I was seven years old then and I remember thinking, ‘Japan is in the future. That’s the future.’ And the second that I said that the whole Production I.G team was like, ‘Oh, we remember that!’”
He adds, “In this series, we're going to a time in a place that, on the one hand, is a very real version of Tokyo in 1997, but that’s also, in the minds of a lot of audiences, a fantastical place. We leaned into the strengths of the artists and the strengths of my collaborators to make the show feel, on the one hand, very lived in and real and realized, and on the other hand, wholly unique.”
The Terminator franchise, created by James Cameron and Gale Anne Hurd, contains six live-action feature films that serve as the foundations and guideposts for Terminator Zero. The property’s first effort was the 1984 film The Terminator starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn and Linda Hamilton. In the film, a cyborg (Schwarzenegger) is sent back in time from 2029 to 1984 Los Angeles as an assassin to hunt and kill a woman named Sarah Connor (Hamilton), whose descendants will bring about the end of the machines.
Though Terminator Zero follows the canon and timeline laid out in the original film series, one unique aspect of the anime is that the story’s present and future are at points in time our current society has lived and experienced. And, though the machine apocalypse is something we in 2022 have yet to experience, Tomlin knew this series had to be realistic in all the ways it could.
“We talked a lot about physics,” he notes. “We talked a lot about what can and can't happen and where the wiggle room was. In the screenplay for Logan, on Page 1, those writers start describing the physics, because they have just come from the other dozen or so X-Men movies, saying, ‘Look. In this world, you bleed. In this world, bullets are going to kill you.’ And I had that in mind when I started writing the first episode of Terminator Zero because, with animation, and particularly with anime, we could be doing a Sailor Moon Terminator in the sky. That could have happened.”
Luckily, there is no Sailor Moon cameo in this Terminator series. In fact, the first sequence of Episode 1 does a great job at setting the tone for the rest of the show. Resistance fighter Eiko (Sonoya Mizuno) is in a fight right from the get-go with a Terminator, running to get as much distance between herself and the manic machine as possible before blasting it with bullets, which appear to have little effect. As the Terminator, machine gun blazing, corners Eiko on a metal bridge over a dark abyss, Eiko straps herself to a rope and swings off, hoping to avoid the Terminator’s shower of bullets. Eventually, the Terminator, tired of the cat-and-mouse game, jumps from the metal bridge and grabs onto Eiko, pulling her down as the rope quickly begins to fray. Eiko struggles to punch and kick the massive metal humanoid off her leg, the series camera shaking each time her limbs slam against the hard metal.
“I’m a fan and I knew the first three movies really well,” says Tomlin. “And Terminator Salvation is a movie that kind of slaps. There’s something about the physics of it. The Terminators feel heavy. The explosions all feel very real. There's a moment, which is actually in the trailer, where there's a head of a Terminator’s skeleton, and it's all singed black, and a helicopter lands on top of it, and John Connor's boot comes down and he starts shooting at its head. Sparks are flying and the scene just has a textural quality to it where you know that these guys blew some shit up. I love that and I wanted to respect the work of the artists that came before.”
In addition to the weighty feel of these very big Terminators, Tomlin also wanted to engage with the pure terror these giant machines elicit from viewers.
“We wanted to lean in on the horror element of the Terminator films, especially one and two,” says Kudō. “I rewatched those many, many times.”
One of the most iconic and chilling Terminator scenes is when Schwarzenegger’s Terminator has been beaten to hell and back by main characters Reese and Sarah, with nothing but his barely intact metal skeleton left, and he begins to menacingly crawl towards Sarah in one last attempt to kill her. And while there are plenty of eerie moments like that in Terminator Zero, Eiko and other characters getting their limbs crushed and sliced to bits without a second thought is also completely terrifying because the situation really does seem hopeless.
“The thing that I was always trying to calibrate with Production I.G is that we wanted this to feel scary,” says Tomlin. “We wanted to get back to that primordial, elemental feeling of the first movie. I was always sending them the clip of Michael Biehn talking about the Terminator and just being like, ‘This thing is coming, and it will never, ever stop. It can't be reasoned with. It can't be bargained with it. It's not going to be happy until it pulls your heart out of your fucking throat.’ For me, there needed to be that weight to the series.”
But Japan is still the motherland of robots, and it only seemed right to also include the beauty of artificial intelligence. That’s where Kokoro, an extensive AI program that takes on a life of its own in the series, comes in.
“In Japan, we believe God is everywhere and we see God in everything around us,” says Kudō. “We believe in many spirits and divine things. It’s something that we revere. So, we wanted Kokoro to look like something that we can revere.”
Kokoro, an AI developed by scientist Malcolm Lee (André Holland) in an effort to save the world from Skynet and Judgement Day, appears first as a bodiless voice, but eventually appears above Malcolm in his workspace as a large rainbow eye, with colors fluctuating as she speaks.
“We wanted Kokoro to appear more as a spiritual existence, rather than wanting her to look physically solid,” says Kudō. “Kokoro is more mythical, like a fairy creature from Japanese myths. So, there is some sense of awe, but she's also an AI that really wants to understand human beings. That’s why we gave her this big eye that opens and closes as she speaks. She’s something very divine, close to God, but also close to us.”
In many ways, the film falls somewhere between a Terminator story and that of iRobot. Rather than a film depicting nothing but negative emotions toward technology, it shows the side that’s evil and the side that could be humanity’s salvation.
“You know that these movies are reboots in some way, that they're all kind of trying to be a sequel to the second one, and so they all have kind of weird relationships to the others,” says Tomlin. “So, on some level, the fact that it had gone through this iterative process freed me from having to be too careful and, instead, put myself in a place and a time and in a medium with animation that we haven't been before.”
Victoria Davis is a full-time, freelance journalist and part-time Otaku with an affinity for all things anime. She's reported on numerous stories from activist news to entertainment. Find more about her work at victoriadavisdepiction.com.
