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LOS ANGELES, CA- Amuse Creative Studio’s New Anime Launch Event brought together two projects approaching the future of anime from dramatically different directions: an adaptation of an enormously popular WEBTOON built around superpowered fighters, friendship and one exceptionally fat cat, and an original production imagining a neon-drenched Tokyo where technology has supposedly made everyone happier.
If the goal was to demonstrate the range of Amuse Creative Studio’s ambitions, it worked.
ELECEED: Destiny and a Fat Cat
The first half of the panel was dedicated to ELECEED, bringing writer Jeho Son, illustrator ZHENA and producer Hiroaki Nakazato to the stage. The chemistry between the trio was instantly infectious, but it was ZHENA who completely stole the show.
Her fiercely strong personality and clear creative vision seemed to perfectly mirror the defiant, fight-for-what-you-believe-in energy of the series itself. And for an audience apparently packed with cat lovers, nothing landed harder than the story behind the WEBTOON’s most recognizable feline.
According to Son, ELECEED almost had a very different animal companion.
He originally conceived the series with a dog in that role, but desperately wanted ZHENA to illustrate the project. As the pair jokingly recounted onstage, ZHENA effectively gave him an ultimatum: she would do it, but only if the animal became a big, fat, lazy orange cat modeled after her own pet.
And thus, a star was born.
Son also happily acknowledged just how much power ZHENA holds over the fate of his characters. He joked that the enormous amount of work she pours into illustrating them can actually influence his writing. Sometimes, a character who might otherwise find themselves on the chopping block survives simply because ZHENA likes them too much to watch them die.
It was an amusing glimpse into the creative partnership behind a series where the relationship between writer and artist appears to be almost as entertaining as the characters they create.
While ZHENA drew characters live onstage, the team confirmed that the ELECEED anime will premiere in early 2027. Nakazato drew one of the panel’s biggest laughs when he admitted that the world-premiere trailer the audience was about to see had literally been completed just two days earlier.
The footage revealed members of the Japanese voice cast, including Junya Enoki as the kind-hearted protagonist Jiwoo Seo, and offered attendees a first animated glimpse at Kayden Break, the extraordinarily powerful Awakened who also happens to transform into a famously round cat.
During the Q&A, the panelists were asked to name their favorite characters. Son and ZHENA both chose Kayden. Son pointed to his entertaining personality and overwhelming strength, while ZHENA emphasized his strong characterization and, naturally, her love of cats.
Nakazato selected Jiwoo, citing the protagonist’s personal growth and the heartwarming friendships at the center of the series.
The enthusiasm wasn’t confined to the stage. So many fans lined up for questions that the panel ultimately ran out of time before everyone had a chance to speak.
That same energy spilled onto the Anime Expo show floor, where Amuse Creative Studio operated a compact but remarkably busy booth. Fans formed a steady line for a lottery wheel offering genuinely cute prizes, while Kayden’s famously round feline form performed a significant amount of promotional labor simply by existing. Son even stopped by during the convention to personally greet the crowds.
RE:BEL ROBOTICA: Mika Pikazo’s Glorious Neon Vision of the Future
Then the panel shifted gears completely.
Supernatural street fights and oversized cats gave way to the glowing streets of Shibuya in 2050 with RE:BEL ROBOTICA, an original anime built around a deceptively simple question: if technology could make our lives measurably better, would it actually make us happier?
The series imagines a near-future society transformed by virtual mixed-reality technology, with Tokyo becoming the city boasting the world’s highest “happiness index.”
Creator and illustrator Mika Pikazo took the stage alongside producer Manabu Yamauchi to discuss the considerable challenge of translating her unmistakably vivid, highly saturated visual style into animation.
Pikazo spoke candidly about just how demanding that process can be. A single character, she explained, may require two to three months of development before the design is finally locked.
For an artist whose work depends so heavily on color, texture and intricate visual information, that painstaking development makes sense.
The presentation also offered some insight into where Pikazo’s extraordinary relationship with color originated. She spoke fondly about the time she spent living and traveling in Brazil and about the influence the country’s music, films and culture had on her artistic perspective and bold use of color.
The impact of that work was especially apparent once the panel opened to audience questions.
Fans lined up not merely to ask about RE:BEL ROBOTICA, but to tell Pikazo directly what her art had meant to them. Several appeared visibly starstruck as they explained that her work had inspired them to become artists themselves. In a presentation devoted largely to imagining the future, those exchanges became an unexpectedly tangible example of one artist already influencing the next generation.
The lengthy development process also appears to be producing something visually distinctive.
The team unveiled a teaser visual featuring the enigmatic heroine Lily and debuted the anime’s first promotional video, which included an insert song by composer Yuki Kajiura. The announced creative staff drew an enthusiastic reaction of its own, with Shin Oonuma serving as chief director, Kōki Onoue as director, PSYCHO-PASS veteran Ryo Yoshigami overseeing series composition and SILVER LINK handling animation production.
But underneath all that color and visual spectacle sits a more complicated idea.
Producer Yamauchi ultimately posed the question at the center of RE:BEL ROBOTICA himself: Does technological advancement truly make people happier?
It was an appropriately unresolved note on which to conclude a showcase devoted to launching new anime into the world.
With ELECEED, Amuse Creative Studio is taking an established global property and attempting to translate the personality, relationships and wonderfully absurd humor that made readers fall in love with it in the first place. With RE:BEL ROBOTICA, it is helping build something entirely new, using one of contemporary illustration’s most distinctive visual voices to imagine what our increasingly technological future might look like.
One project asks us to put our faith in friendship, superpowers and a very fat orange cat.
The other asks whether the future we’re building will actually make us happy once we get there.
At Anime Expo, Amuse Creative Studio made a compelling case for finding out.
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Amuse Creative Studio Unveils ELECEED and RE:BEL ROBOTICA at Anime Expo 2026
