The way that anime comes to the United States is pretty simple. When a manga gains traction in Japan and then gets adapted into an anime, if it finds enough success, it's brought over to the United States. While the internet has sped up this process to a point where shows, more often than not, come to the United States, Europe and Japan all at the same time, anime and manga are both traditionally Japanese in origin. This formula, however, was turned on its head when back in 2017 Marvel announced that their new show, Future Avengers, would be an anime aired in Japan only. Now, three years later, the show will be making its American debut on Disney+.
So, what makes Future Avengers any different from Marvel's existing animated movies and shows? Beyond the art style the first key difference between this anime and something like The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes is that the Avengers, while the only characters displayed in Disney's announcement promo, are not the only protagonists of the show. The Avengers featured are the usual suspects like Captain America, Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk and the Wasp, but instead of headlining, they act as mentors to a group of super-powered teens.
The main characters are Makoto, Chloe and Adi, who have all been genetically modified by Hydra and raised to see the Avengers as villains and themselves as heroes. Upon going out on their first mission for Hydra, the teenagers discover the group's evil intentions and decide to defect. In the process, they are picked up by the Avengers who take them under their wing, in hopes of raising them to be their successors.
Of course, this is not the first time fans have seen these two genres mixed. Madhouse, the studio that is putting out Future Avengers has a history of working on Marvel anime such as, Iron Man, Wolverine, Blade and X-Men. Additionally, the writer of Future Avengers previously worked on the Marvel anime, Marvel Disk Wars: The Avengers. To be clear, though, the focus on Makato and his friends makes this series more of an interpretation of Marvel's continuity than a direct adaptation done in an anime style.
This sort of storytelling is far more common in anime and manga than it is in American comics which tend to focus on adult characters who have already come into their own in terms of status and ability. Where the previous Marvel Anime acted as direct adaptations of the publisher's continuity with an anime style, Future Avengers is more of an interpretation of the classic comic book universe and its characters. Both Kohei Horikoshi's My Hero Academia and One-Punch Man fall into this category of interpretation with the former being a superhero universe like Marvel's or DC's but with a Naruto-esque spin that makes it into a fresh experience and the latter being a hilarious direct critique of the at times stagnant nature of American superhero fiction. Meaning in a sense that both are manga's answers to Marvel and DC.
What ultimately makes Future Avengers so exciting is that it has the potential to mix adaptation and interpretation. Where it's obvious that characters like Saitama and All-Might draw a pretty easy comparison to Superman, Future Avengers gets to use actual Captain America and not just someone similar to him. This means that fans will get to see the truest form of an anime interpretation of superhero comics to date.
It's difficult to say how Future Avengers will be received by an American audience but so far the show has been successful in Japan. At the time of writing this, the series has two seasons under its belt and a third is currently in development. Only the first season is going to be added to Disney+ in February, but one can only assume that the dubbed version of the second season will be added at some point later on this year.