Sentai Filmworks announced Monday that it has licensed Doomsday With My Dog for release in America. The animated webcomic is adapted from a manga by Yū Ishihara. HIDIVE will be the exclusive streaming home of the animated shorts. They are set to premiere this summer.
Sentai Filmworks describes the story as:
The sole surviving human and her canine companion, Haru, wander a desolate wasteland after the destruction of civilization, but this is no dark doomsday tale. Haru, a wise-beyond-his-years talking shiba inu, makes sure his master stays one step ahead of post-apocalyptic pessimism with his clever antics, hilarious observations and philosophical ponderings. She may be the last girl on earth, but with Haru at her side, the road through the apocalypse will never be boring!
In Japan Doomsday With My Dog will premiere on YouTube. Mutsumi Tamura has been cast as Haru the dog while Maaya Uchida has been cast as Haru's master and the world's sole survivor. The animated webcomic is to be adapted to animation by Studio DLE, the studio responsible for the acclaimed Okko's Inn and DC Super Heroes vs. Eagle Talon. The series has tapped Aoi Shimoyama and Sorosoro Tanigawa (Taeko no Nichijō) to direct the majority of the series. The Doomsday With My Dog manga debuted in March 2018 as an exclusive for Kadokawa's ComicWalker website. Kadokawa has published three volumes of the manga to date, with the third volume being published in December 2020.
The story takes place in a time when humanity has ceased to exist on Earth. The only person still alive is a teenage girl and her Shibu dog named Haru. The series revolves around the two companions roaming the desolate world and the discoveries they make along the way. The journey for Doomsday With My Dog from manga to web animation has been an interesting one to observe. The series originally started as a webcomic that was shared exclusively on the author's Twitter account, with no prospects of it being professionally published.
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However, the series gained a sizable following on the website and soon caught the attention of Kadokawa, who felt the unique mix of cuteness and bleak drama would be a good fit for their website. The series was picked up to be published on ComicWalker, where it developed enough of a following that it was then printed in book form. The series premiering on YouTube in Japan reflects the four panel nature of the source material, and thus a series of shorts makes sense for an adaptation.
Normally short-form anime tends to go unnoticed by companies in America, so the fact that Sentai not only felt strongly enough about the series to license it and then make an announcement that it will be a HIDIVE exclusive speaks volumes about the potential the company sees in it. Whether through Sentai's confidence in the series, the rising popularity of the Shibu dog breed, or morbid curiosity by casual browsers on the service, it will be interesting to see what kind of audience Doomsday With My Dog ends up attracting here in the West.
Source: Sentai Filmworks