Netflix’s animated series adaptation of Leviathan, Scott Westerfeld’s excellent middle-grade series full of whale zeppelins and steampunk armies, is still a ways off; the new teaser says only “Coming 2025.” But what a strange teaser it is. For just shy of two minutes, the world of Leviathan is introduced wordlessly, with an increasingly dramatic score the only sounds to be heard.
Dialogue-free trailers are often a bad sign, though of course there are exceptions. And we’re so far out from this movie’s release that I’m willing to cut it a little slack. But still: the vibes are a little off. The mood is weird. Leviathan is serious, sure, in that any story set during a war is serious, but it’s also an adventure set in a creatively invented world. This goes straight from a sort of over-familar heartstring-tugging into war and explosions and grandiose swooping strains with an epic choir. It is hard to know what to make of it.
But it looks pretty neat? I cannot deny that I got goosebumps seeing the big flying whales. Leviathan comes from Orange, the animation studio behind Beastars, and is the directorial debut of Christophe Ferreira. Netflix’s very brief summary says only, “In 1914, on the eve of war, a fugitive prince and a girl in disguise meet aboard a bioengineered airship, the HMS Leviathan, and change the course of history.” The book summary offers a little more detail:
It is the cusp of World War I. The Austro-Hungarians and Germans have their Clankers, steam-driven iron machines loaded with guns and ammunition. The British Darwinists employ genetically fabricated animals as their weaponry. Their Leviathan is a whale airship, and the most masterful beast in the British fleet.
Aleksandar Ferdinand, a Clanker, and Deryn Sharp, a Darwinist, are on opposite sides of the war. But their paths cross in the most unexpected way, taking them both aboard the Leviathan on a fantastical, around-the-world adventure…. One that will change both their lives forever.
Presumably, we’ll get a full trailer for Leviathan before its 2025 release. In the meantime, another Westerfeld adaptation, the movie of Uglies, is coming to Netflix later this week.
