Netflix’s Anime Eden Shows the Robot Apocalypse Can Be Beautiful

Netflix’s Anime Eden Shows the Robot Apocalypse Can Be Beautiful

Maybe Terminator had it wrong. Maybe, if robots rise up and overthrow humanity, the Earth won’t be a charred, smoking sphere covered in human skulls. Maybe without humans around to mess it up, nature will recover and the planet will be lush and scenic again. This first trailer for the Netflix anime Eden certainly believes so.

Here’s the official synopsis and the trailer, since the latter is light on specifics:

“The upcoming sci-fi fantasy series Eden is set thousands of years in the future, where a city known as ‘Eden 3′ is inhabited solely by robots whose former masters vanished a long time ago. On a routine assignment, two farming robots accidentally awaken a human baby girl from stasis questioning all they were taught to believe — that humans were nothing more than a forbidden ancient myth. Together, the two robots secretly raise the child in a safe haven outside Eden.”

As you can see in the trailer, Sarah (Ruby Rose Turner) is the tot found by the robots E92 (David Tennant) and A37 (Rosario Dawson), who get the rather intense job of saving humanity. It’s unclear why all the humans have been imprisoned or locked in stasis or whatever, but given that the cape-wearing, human-hating Zero (Neil Patrick Harris) is clearly the robots’ evil leader, it seems likely he led some kind of mild apocalypse. The CG animation isn’t particularly grabbing me, but the story seems pleasant enough.

Directed by Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood’s Yasuhiro Irie, the four-episode series was originally supposed to come out last spring, but… you know. Now it will premiere on Netflix on May 27.