BLUE RIGHTS has released a pilot film for OROCHI -Seventh Echoes-, an original animated feature, along with a teaser visual and the main staff. Takashi Nakamura is directing, and he is also credited with the original concept, the original character designs and the art setting.
The pilot film uses “Zankyo” by neNna as its theme song. That is worth stating plainly, because a pilot film is not a trailer. It is a proof of concept, usually made to show partners and investors what a finished production would look like before anyone commits the money to make one.
That reading fits the rest of the announcement. BLUE RIGHTS says the project is looking for creative and co-production partners, and that the goal is to build a long-term property spanning serialized manga, short films, character projects, toys and other merchandise. So the pilot is a sales document. The film exists as a plan, not as a scheduled release.
The story
BLUE RIGHTS describes the film like this:
Kukulkan is a kingdom sustained by sound waves. Born with a power known as “Hizumi,” Agni was abandoned by the royal family and grew up surrounded by his guardian and friends. His power awakens Orochi, a force of calamity believed to have died a thousand years ago. When Orochi awakens, he calls Agni “my son.” Who is Agni? What is this power for? To protect those he loves, the boy confronts the threat he has awakened. An epic adventure begins as sound and myth resonate together.
A kingdom built on sound waves gives the production its visual hook. Sound-based worlds are rare in anime for a practical reason: you cannot see sound, so every scene has to invent a way to render it. If the pilot film commits to that idea, it becomes the main reason to watch.
Why Takashi Nakamura is the story here
Nakamura was the character designer and animation director on the Akira film, and he directed A Tree of Palme and co-directed Harmony. Those three credits describe a career that has stayed on the artier end of anime feature work for four decades.
A Tree of Palme in particular is the closest reference point. It is a loose adaptation of Pinocchio, visually dense, deliberately slow, and it was not a hit when it opened in 2002. Nakamura has spent most of his career making films that look unlike anything else in the medium and are difficult to sell. Pairing him with a company explicitly hunting for co-production partners makes sense: he brings the visual identity, and the partners are supposed to bring the money.
Tokuyuki Matsutake is designing the characters, with Medabots, Ninja vs. Gokudo and Tales of Phantasia on his record.
The rest of the staff list: Mitsunori Murata as in-between animation supervisor, Kazuyuki Hashimoto as art director, Koji Hashiguchi as art setting assistant, Terumi Nakauchi on color design, Keisuke Sasagawa of TRICK BLOCK as CGI director, Mitsuhiro Sato of animocaramel as director of photography, Makoto Kimura as planning producer, and Shō Shigemitsu of IKKO-IKKO as production producer.
The company behind the pilot
Makoto Kimura founded BLUE RIGHTS in 2024, after retiring from MAPPA, where he had been an executive director, rights management director and producer. The company said at the time that it would produce televised and theatrical anime plus work outside anime: manga, novels, music, music videos, events, commercials and products.
The important part is the last sentence of that plan. BLUE RIGHTS prioritizes planning and production over animation production, which means it is not trying to be a studio. It is trying to be the company that owns things. Kimura’s background at MAPPA was in rights management, and the OROCHI plan, with its manga, shorts, toys and merchandise, is a rights-management pitch.
That is a different model from the one most anime films follow. Usually a production committee assembles around an existing manga or novel, splits the rights, and the animation studio is one member among several. Here the property starts as an original idea inside a company built for rights, which gives it more control over how the IP gets used and less certainty about who pays for it.
Two other recent stories show how fast this end of the industry is moving: CyberAgent taking a stake in MAPPA’s parent company, and ABEMA picking three independent creators for a pilot anime. Original projects are increasingly pitched with a demo already attached.
What happens next
Nothing is scheduled. There is no release date, no distributor, and no confirmed runtime beyond the description of it as a feature. The pilot film and the teaser visual are the entire public output, and the next milestone would be a partner announcement.
That makes this one to file away rather than follow day to day. Nakamura directing an original feature with a sound-based mythology is the kind of project that either finds its financing and turns up two years from now, or quietly stays a pilot. The film’s own description is honest about which stage it is at.
Source: Anime News Network, citing a BLUE RIGHTS press release
Featured image: Title card from the OROCHI -Seventh Echoes- pilot film, via BLUE RIGHTS.
