“My mom became a crater.”
Well, that is one way to introduce an anime.
The first teaser for Death Stranding Isolations has arrived, and it already feels exactly as strange as something connected to Hideo Kojima should. The upcoming series will tell a new story inside the world of Death Stranding, with a young girl who has survived an extremely unusual family tragedy.
And yes, the crater appears to be literal.
For anyone who has not played the games, Death Stranding takes place after a catastrophic event caused the worlds of the living and dead to collide. Ghostly creatures called BTs now wander the landscape. Human corpses can also create enormous explosions known as voidouts if somebody fails to deal with them quickly enough.
Basically, dying creates quite a bit of paperwork.
The games follow Sam Porter Bridges, played by Norman Reedus, as he travels across a broken America delivering supplies and reconnecting isolated communities. Along the way, he carries enough cargo to make every courier company feel slightly inadequate. But Death Stranding Isolations will not retell Sam’s story.
According to Kojima Productions, the anime takes place inside the same world while Sam attempts to reconnect the continent. It follows other people trying to survive isolation in their own ways. The teaser concentrates on a young girl who lost her mother during the disaster. That loss forced her into loneliness. But the interesting part is that she eventually grew comfortable there.
Now this is where the anime may have found its strongest idea. Most stories treat loneliness as something a character desperately wants to escape. But isolation can also become familiar. When the outside world brings pain, remaining alone may feel safer than creating another connection that can disappear. The girl does not appear to be waiting for someone to save her from solitude. She may need convincing that connection is worth the danger.
And that fits Death Stranding perfectly.
The games often tell players that human connection matters. You rebuild roads with materials contributed by strangers, leave useful equipment behind and receive help from people you may never meet. Even when you play alone, evidence of other players appears around you. That system creates something rather special. A person you cannot see may place a ladder exactly where you need it. Suddenly, crossing a river becomes easier because somebody else thought about the next traveller.
An anime cannot recreate that interaction.
We will not control the journey, select the route or spend 20 minutes attempting to balance several boxes on a character’s back. So Isolations must make the idea of connection work without asking viewers to participate in it. The wider story will also feature an old man searching for salvation outside the network created by Bridges, a female warrior who wants constant conflict and a boy who holds a grudge against Sam. Their stories will eventually collide as another disaster approaches.
So, a completely ordinary group of people.
Takayuki Sano directs the series for E&H Production. Tow Ubukata handles the screenplay and series composition, while Ilya Kuvshinov created the original character designs. Hideo Kojima serves as executive producer. The animation will use hand-drawn 2D artwork, which gives the teaser a very different feeling from the games. Death Stranding is known for detailed landscapes, realistic performances and several famous actors looking deeply concerned while standing in the rain.
The anime does not need to imitate that.
It can use movement, colour and illustration to explore the world from another perspective. And choosing original characters gives the team room to tell a story without trying to reproduce Norman Reedus or explain why a digital version looks slightly different from the person we already recognise. Just to make things a little confusing, Isolations is not the only Death Stranding adaptation in development. An animated film called Death Stranding: Mosquito is also on the way, while A24 is developing a separate live-action movie.
Watch trailer here:
Clearly, this universe refuses to remain isolated.
Death Stranding Isolations will stream on Disney+ in 2027. We do not have an exact release date yet, and the teaser gives us more questions than answers. But that feels appropriate. After all, this is Death Stranding. If everything made complete sense immediately, I would be slightly concerned.
