Metallic Rouge: Everything you need to know about your new favorite anime, according to the creators

For twenty five years, one of the premier anime studios in Japan has been BONES, the studio behind such enormously popular and highly influential anime as Fullmetal Alchemist, My Hero Academia, and Mob Psycho 100. BONES isn’t slowing down, poised to launch the new mecha anime series Metallic Rouge in January 2024, with international streaming available through Crunchyroll. Packed with themes of existence and identity, with plenty of fiery, hi-octane battles, Metallic Rouge is ready to become the biggest anime debut of 2024 and continue BONES’ legacy for another 20 years.

What is Metallic Rouge about?

An original property, not based on an existing manga or game, Metallic Rouge is set in a future where humanity has colonized and terraformed Mars, with androids obediently servicing people around the planet. The story follows an android girl named Rouge and her new friend Naomi as they contend with nine artificial humans who have their own malevolent plans for humanity and its future on Mars. This leads to epic battles between mechas, with Rouge possessing an awesome transformation that allows her to tap into her full potential and save the day.

In a roundtable interview at Anime NYC 2023 attended by Popverse, BONES President and Metallic Rouge producer Masahiko Minami, supervising director and series composition writer Yutaka Izubuchi, and music composer Taisei Iwasaki talked about the haunting tech noir aesthetic that brings the series to atmospheric life, the musical composition choices behind Metallic Rouge, and what fans can expect when Metallic Rouge premieres on Crunchyroll this January.

The influences behind Metallic Rouge

With the creative freedom afforded building an original property from the ground up, Metallic Rouge features a noticeable blend of influences, from spaghetti western allusions in the musical score to tokusatsu-inspired designs for the transformed characters as they battle each other. “The first thing we worked on was the chronological storyline, this is the history of the world as they know it,” Minami added. To give the story a more propulsive quality, two out of nine of the artificial humans are neutralized at the start of the series. With that history and background established, this allowed the creative team to “focus on a specific part of the story.”

“I had a visual in my mind that preceded all of this, of a boy watching what looked like stars coming down,” BONES President and Metallic Rouge producer Minami recalled about the inspiration behind Metallic Rouge. “That was the first contact of the human race with aliens and the first point in which this history begins. All of this are the consequences from this one image.”

“What we want to focus on is that this isn’t Mars as we know it today,” Minami observed in response to a question from Popverse about the moody tech noir environments of Metallic Rouge. “It’s been