The Creator of ‘The Apothecary Diaries’ Just Announced an Anime About Ninjas Fighting Dinosaurs, and It Looks Wildly Ambitious – Watch the Trailer

‘Jurassic Shadows‘ is real, it is exactly what it sounds like, and the anime community is losing its mind over it. Director Norihiro Naganuma, best known for steering ‘The Apothecary Diaries’ to critical acclaim, unveiled the project at Anime Expo 2026 on July 4 alongside a first promotional trailer, and the concept alone has been generating tremendous buzz, with Culture Crave and dozens of other outlets immediately sharing the footage to a wildly enthusiastic response.

The story is set in Tokyo in 2029. Dinosaurs, long believed to have been wiped out by the asteroid impact, have secretly survived by passing their DNA into humanity through interbreeding. Hidden among ordinary people, they now prey upon humans while living unnoticed within society.

Standing against them is a covert order of ninjas who wield Ryugesho, a special pigment infused with ancient memories. By applying this mysterious pigment, they awaken the powers of dinosaurs within themselves and fight back against the predators threatening humanity.

The series is described as combining dinosaurs, ninjas, and “kesho” (make-up), creating a unique and stylized power system. It is a genuinely distinctive concept, and the trailer makes clear that Naganuma is not treating the premise as a joke. The footage showcases a neon-drenched modern Tokyo overrun with prehistoric predators, with the ninja protagonists using the Ryugesho pigment in ways that feel visually inventive rather than simply decorative.

The anime was announced by Naganuma during his own panel at Anime Expo. Kenta Ihara, writer of ‘Saga of Tanya the Evil’ and the ‘Ishura’ anime adaptations, is writing the screenplay. Other key staff include character designer Yukiko Nakatani, who designed characters for ‘The Apothecary Diaries,’ and music composer Shūhei Mutsuki, whose previous work includes ‘Lycoris Recoil.’ The studio producing the animation is Cannon Code.

A manga adaptation of ‘Jurassic Shadows’ is also in development at Kodansha, running alongside the anime production. That dual-format approach is a strategy that has worked well for similar titles, giving the property multiple routes to build its audience before and after the anime’s premiere window.

The involvement of Naganuma is arguably the single biggest reason the announcement landed with such force. ‘The Apothecary Diaries’ became one of the defining anime of recent years, praised for its meticulous visual world-building and its willingness to take a slow-burn mystery seriously. The idea of the director pivoting from imperial Chinese court intrigue to prehistoric predator combat in a neon-lit Tokyo sounds like a wild swing, but the trailer suggests the same visual intentionality is present here.

No release date or platform has been announced yet, and no voice cast has been revealed. But given the creative pedigree behind the project and the scale of the response from the Anime Expo crowd alone, ‘Jurassic Shadows’ already feels like one of the most anticipated original anime announcements of the year, a project built on a premise that should not work nearly as well as it clearly does.

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