#Gonzo, N Lite Team Up For 2 Animation Projects Executive Produced By Into the Spider-Verse’s Peter Ramsey 

Anime production studio Gonzo, which has recently been fascinated with NFTs after a long and messy history, is teaming up the “afro-anime”-focused multimedia company N Lite to produce two new projects executive produced by Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse co-director Peter Ramsey.

According to Variety, one of these projects is a “live-action/anime hybrid feature” titled Ripper, which sees two detectives tracking “a serial killer who took the lives of the women that each of them loved” in post-World War 2 Japan. The other is Hotaru, a “swashbuckling sci-fi/fantasy adventure series about two star-crossed magic-wielding warriors bound by love and grief.” 　

Aside from executive producing, Ramsey is co-writing Ripper, which is created by N Lite’s Head of Production Samantha Inoue Harte and the show’s other co-writers Paul Paul Alvarado-Dykstra and Rafael Antonio Ruiz. The production company JuVee Productions, founded by actor Viola Davis and husband Julius Tennon, is also involved in the project. Two of JuVee’s members are joining Ramsey and Gonzo CEO Shinichiro Ishikawa as executive producers.

For Hotaru, the creator credits go to Inoue Harte, Alvarado-Dykstra, and N Lite’s CEO Christiano Terry. The executive producers, apart from Ramsey, are Inoue Harte and Alvarado-Dykstra. Terry, who was among 11 startup founders featured in a paid advertorial piece published on Anime News Network, is producing.

N LITE’s Linkedin profile describes it as a “multimedia company that brings untapped stories from the black & indigenous imagination to life for a diverse global community.” In a statement reported by Variety, Ramsey said that he was “excited” to work with the company “on a project that is deeply personal. The shared experiences of Black and Japanese people in Japan during WWII is a historical and cultural intersection that we’ve not yet seen on screen. It’s also an incredible time for anime as a whole, and as a true lover of the medium, I’m eager to create something that has never been done before.”

Meanwhile, Ishikawa was reported as saying, “All of us at Gonzo are proud to partner with N Lite and Peter Ramsey on these bold new original projects. They were conceived as inclusive international co-productions for diverse global audiences, and N Lite is the perfect match given our shared vision and values. We are honored to attract such esteemed creative collaborators who share our commitment to innovative storytelling.”

Last January, Anime News Network reported that N LITE was producing the “afro-anime” film MFINDA. Film distributor GKIDS later revealed that the adventure title was a N LITE and Studio M2 co-production, with Studio M2 and MAPPA founder Masao Maruyama (also a Madhouse co-founder) on board as producer.