Scott Westerfield’s alt-history epic Leviathan is getting an anime adaption

World War I history enthusiasts, young adult literature readers, and anime fans have something to look forward to next year. Scott Westerfield’s alternate-historical war novel Leviathan is getting an anime adaptation, and it debuts on Netflix in 2025.

Leviathan puts a bio-punk and diesel-punk spin on World War I

If you haven’t read Leviathan and its two sequels, let me give you a quick sum-up. It’s 1914, and the flames of World War I have just started burning across Europe. This isn’t our great-great grandparents’ World War I, though; in Westerfield’s reimagined 20th-century Earth, the forces of the Allied and Central powers wage war against each other with bio-engineered beasts and diesel-fueled automatons.

The story of Leviathan follows two protagonists: Aleksander of Hohenburg, an Austro-Hungarian prince forced to flee his homeland after a failed attempt on his life, and Deryn Sharp, a London girl who disguises herself as a boy so she can enlist in the Royal Air Force. Fate brings the two together on the back of the Leviathan, a living cetacean battleship, and they embark on a journey that changes the course of the war and history.

Studio Orange brings the world of Leviathan to beautiful, Frankensteinian life

I have many thoughts about the anime industry’s recent shift toward 3-D animation, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like what I saw in Leviathan‘s first trailer. Orange Co., Ltd work on Beastars and Trigun Stampede demonstrated the studio knows how to capture the primal ferocity of nature and the complex allure of technology. Leviathan‘s pages are chocked full of high-flying bouts between monsters and machines, and I’m curious to see what Orange does with some of the series’ most iconic battles.

Whatever lingering fears I had about the effort being up into Leviathan vanished like diesel smoke when I ran down the list of names attached. Christophe Ferreira, who worked as an animator on Persepolis and Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, sits in the director’s chair. Justin Leach (Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, Star Wars Visions) and Taiki Sakurai (Eden, Cyberpunk Edgerunners) serve as producers. Joe Hisaishi, the composer behind the soundtracks of almost every Studio Ghibli movie, will provide the music, and that’s about where I fainted.

Leviathan’s offers a fresh path forward for YA adaptions

I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that a Leviathan adaption of any kind is happening, let alone one its creators seem to be invested in. Unless their name happens to be Harry Potter, YA speculative fiction series tend to get the short end of the adaptation stick. My therapist and I are still grappling with my memories of watching Fox’s Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief in theaters, and that’s just one of many mediocre YA film adaptions I’ve sat through over the years.

By embracing the animated medium, Westerfield has proven that YA book-to-film adaptations don’t have to limit themselves by following in the Harry Potter movies’ footsteps. I can’t wait to see what the people over at Qubic and Orange do with the Leviathan trilogy, and I’m even more excited to see if other YA authors decide to dabble in animation. Maybe I’ll get that Fablehaven animated series twelve-year-old me dreamed about, after all.