Kaiju Decode: The Ring of Aidara shows its first footage and casts Aya Yamane and Karin Takahashi as Maru and Coco
Toei Animation and Tsuburaya Productions released a teaser and a third key visual on October 18 for their 2027 kaiju anime, set in Sakai, Osaka, with ARECT co-animating and Katsuie Shibata writing.
A girl offering her hand to a monster is the image Toei Animation and Tsuburaya Productions chose for the third key visual of KAIJU DECODE: Aidara no Yubiwa (Kaiju Decode: The Ring of Aidara), revealed on October 18 together with a teaser trailer. The teaser is the first look at actual animation from the 2027 project, and it also introduced the voices of its two leads.
Aya Yamane plays Maru and Karin Takahashi plays Coco. Neither the trailer nor the official site gives a release date beyond 2027, and no broadcaster or streaming service has been named.
Two sides of one city
The story takes place in Sakai, in Osaka Prefecture. Maru belongs to the City, a society that has shed the constraints of body, mind, space and time; the official site describes him as upbeat and a bit of a troublemaker who earns his keep hunting kaiju alongside a partner he treats like an older brother. Coco comes from the Aidara tribe and lives out in the Zone, a hazardous area populated by beings called Transcendent Organisms. She is a kaiju tamer who wants humans and monsters to share the world, and the site sketches her as composed but endlessly curious. With the two standing on opposite sides, the plot follows their search for a way to coexist.
The new visual centers on Coco, smiling as she reaches toward a kaiju, which Animage Plus reads as a picture of how she feels about the creatures.
Staff
The director is credited only as S/N. Novelist Katsuie Shibata writes the script. Character design is split between Sei Nakashima, who drew Maru, and Masatsugu Saito, who drew Coco, while Masayuki Goto of Tsuburaya Productions designs the kaiju themselves. ARECT and Toei Animation share animation production, with Toei Animation as producer and the two companies jointly credited with the original concept.
A long-running experiment
KAIJU DECODE dates back to November 2019, when Tsuburaya and Toei announced it as a joint transmedia project built around a girl-and-monster theme. It has since branched into a short CG anime, which AniList dates to December 2021, a VR animation called KAIJU DECODE -first contact-, and a mixed-reality game, KAIJU DECODE -super multiverse-. The Ring of Aidara was announced in 2025 as the project's new anime.
