Ahead of a highly anticipated special stage event at this year’s AnimeJapan, TMS Entertainment took to Twitter to share some key information regarding their upcoming anime adaptation of Riichiro Inagaki and Boichi’s Dr. STONE manga. Among the announcement of the main staff for the project was also the unveiling of a new key visual, which is only the second one we’ve received since the adaptation’s initial announcement in November. Check it out below:

The main thing to take away from this new key visual, apart from the excellent background art contained within, is that the characters of Taiju, Yuzuhira and Tsubasa are front and center along with Senku. This seems to suggest that the anime will indeed be adapting the initial arc of the series, despite the common opinion that the arc is not very indicative of the quality of the series.

But I have faith that the adaptation will be able to avoid some of the problems of this arc when looking at the newly announced staff list. Handling the scripts will be Yuichiro Kido, who also worked on the scripts for Pop Team Epic, which was an anime adaptation that took great liberties with its source material in order to craft a compelling adaptation. Joining him will be Shinya Iino, who served as assistant director on the recent Made in Abyss anime adaptation, which was again a project that took certain liberties when adapting it’s source material to great effect, mainly in terms of pacing.

All of this makes me think that the staff will be more than capable of circumventing the problems of the initial arc in pacing and characterization and getting to the good stuff more quickly. The key visual also shows that character designer Yuuko Iwasa is more than capable of translating the character designs to work better in animation. The designs of Senku and Tsubasa, in particular, have been simplified, yet still remain iconic and unique, which should allow for better visual fidelity.

The last staff members announced for the project were those who will be handling the music - emphasis on the plural as not one, not two, but three individual staff members will be doing so. These are Tatsuya Kato, Hiroaki Tsutsumi, and Yuki Kanesaka. The first question that obviously comes to mind is why on Earth does the project need three individuals on music in the first place? Hopefully, this is a case of combined vision, rather than turning out to be a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth…

In any case, with this winter season coming to an end and entering into the spring season, the Dr. STONE anime’s tentative premiere date of July inches ever closer. All I need now is a new PV and I’ll be very happy until then.