The proverbial genre blender appeared to be stuck on high as the live-action series from Japan Alice in Borderland makes its way to Netflix. The horror-adventure series based off a long-running manga release its second trailer ahead of a December release date.

The best way to describe Alice in Borderland using more familiar terms is that it takes The Hunger Games, Saw and a ordinary pack of playing cards and smashes them together into a killer genre mashup. The second trailer released in the days before Thanksgiving with the series slated to debut on Netflix worldwide December 10.

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While the show had a short anime adaptation (commonly known as an OVA) Alice in Borderland built its audience via comicbooks/manga. The popular manga ended an eight-year run in 2018 before the live-action version was greenlit. The show follows high school student Ryōhei Arisu (aka Alice) as he slogs along his boring everyday life. Suddenly he and his friends Karube and Chōta are caught up in a strange event that transports them into an alternate version of the world where they are forced to participate in a survival game. The trio are forced to fight their way home against a mysterious force that uses a deck of cards and twisted games to determine their fate.

The series stars Kento Yamazaki as Ryōhei and Tao Tsuchiya as the female lead Yuzuha Usagi. Both have worked on live-action adaptations of other anime like Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure and Ruroni Kenshin. The director Shinsuke Satō and script writers Yoshiki Watabe and Yasuko Kuramitsu are also veterans of other anime/manga adaptations. The other notable roles are Yūki Morinaga as Chōta and Keita Machida as Karube.

It’s rare that a manga this popular doesn’t get a full anime series, but Alice in Borderland does feel more at home as a live-action adaptation because everything about it feels more like horror movies with all the familiar genre bits that are universally familiar. The monolithic killer, the twisted life-or-death situations that force ordinary people to reveal their character and the ever looming prospect of death around every corner. The show should be good fun for those of us into that sort of thing.

Netflix made a commitment to bringing more anime to its platform, but there is also a wealth of live-action television from Japan that is worth watching. This is particularly true in the horror genre so here is to hoping that more like Alice in Borderland comes west.

Alice in Borderland is slated to release world wide on Netflix December 10

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Source: Netflix/YouTube