Ryoko Kui’s Delicious in Dungeon, a tale of broke adventurers cooking monsters they encounter to save money, is one of my favorite comics of recent years. It’s a feast of delicious food, lovable characters and surprisingly deep fantasy world-building. The 97th and final chapter of the manga was published on September 15th this year in Kadokawa’s Harta magazine, and has 12 volumes published in English by Yen Press.
But don’t despair; an anime series will air on Netflix in January 2024. with two consecutive cours already announced. The most recent trailer featured a familiar red dragon, elaborate cooking sequences and BUMP OF CHICKEN‘s opening theme song for Delicious in Dungeon, “Sleep Walking Orchestra.” Check it out below, plus more from Kadokawa’s YouTube channel:
Studio Trigger, fresh from the success of Cyberpunk: Edgerunners, is animating the series. The director Yoshihiro Miyajima made a commercial for the manga at the studio in 2019. While Delicious in Dungeon is his first full director credit, he played an invaluable role in past Trigger titles. These include the Little Witch Academia television series, Kiznaiver and SSSS.Dynazenon. Miyajima is a long-time Delicious in Dungeon reader who has dreamed of an adaptation for years. This project is his chance to prove himself among the studio’s stable of young directors.
Many of the other staff members are fans of Delicious in Dungeon. One of them is story editor Kimiko Ueno, who previously contributed scripts to Trigger’s Brand New Animal. “My intention was to put the exact same excitement and thrill that I felt when I first read the manga into the script,” she said.
Another fan of the manga series is character designer and chief animation director Naoki Takeda. “I’ll do my best,” he said, “to carefully extract and insert the fun I felt reading the manga for the first time, as well as Laios and the others’ lively interactions!”
BUMP OF CHICKEN are also Delicious in Dungeon fans. “We were very moved that this one-and-only unique world and story would be recreated as an anime,” they said. They tease “something we’ve never eaten before, something slightly scary that we still want to try or maybe even something that looks so ridiculously delicious that we’d be willing to eat it…” Of course, BUMP OF CHICKEN have always been manga fiends. They previously collaborated on a 2014 music video inspired by Chico Umeno’s excellent series “March Comes in Like a Lion,” two years before the 2016 anime adaptation.
Perhaps the most unexpected collaborator on the Delicious in Dungeon anime creative team is Yasunori Mitsuda. the legendary video game composer responsible for Xenogears and Chrono Cross. For Delicious in Dungeon, he challenged himself to compose pieces in an “early medieval” style. “Those ancient instruments are said to be the ancestors of today’s musical instruments,” he said. “Only a few people can play them as the instruments themselves are hard to come by.” I’m curious to see just how Mitsuda’s contributions break the mold.
Ryoko Kui produced an illustration to commemorate the new Delicious in Dungeon teaser. It remixes the famous “Horse in Motion” photographed by Eadweard Muybridge. Muybridge invented the zoopraxiscope, a landmark device in the prehistory of film and animation. Kui reimagines the Horse in Motion as an underwater Kelpie in Motion. I can’t help but wonder if Laios, the hero of Delicious in Dungeon, is lecturing his companions about Muybridge or kelpies in the picture. Perhaps both?
Appropriately enough, it was Laios’s voice actor Kentaro Kumagai who first announced the anime teaser on social media. “The responsibility felt so great that my hands were shaking as I posted the tweet,” he said. The director Miyajima insisted that Kumagai’s tendency to “drift among the four party members” made him the perfect fit for Laios. “It wouldn’t be quite right for the production of the four of them got along too well from the start,” he said.
Studio Trigger’s best work shares with Laios a deep passion for trivial things. The team lined up to create the series is more than capable of doing justice to Kui’s source material. Here’s hoping they are given the time and resources they need to cook this series to perfection.
The Delicious in Dungeon anime series produced by Studio Trigger, inspired by the manga by Ryoko Kui, will debut in January 2024 on Netflix.
