The Summit of the Gods: Netflix Releases Trailer of Mountaineer Anime

The Summit of the Gods is an award-winning adult manga series that explored the existential dimensions of mountain climbing, and Netflix just released a trailer for an animated theatrical movie coming to US cinemas and streaming in late November. Indiewire was the first to unveil the trailer. The animated epic was adapted by French director Patrick Imbert from The Summit of the Gods, a popular manga series by Jirô Taniguchi and Baku Yumemakura, which drew from Yumemakura’s original serialized novel, which was published between 1994 and 1997.

“Were George Mallory and his companion Andrew Irvine the first men to scale Everest on June 8, 1924? Only the little Vestpocket Kodak camera they took with them might reveal the truth. In Kathmandu, 70 years later, a young Japanese reporter named Fukamachi Makoto recognizes the camera in the hands of the mysterious Habu Joji, an outcast climber believed missing for years. Fukamachi enters a world of obsessive mountaineers hungry for impossible conquests on a journey that leads him, step by step, towards the summit of the gods.”

“In order to fit five tomes into a single story, you must make choices and find a structure,” Imbert said of adapting the manga. “I came back to the simple question: What was Yumemakura’s intent? At the mountain’s horn, there was that thread, this rope, which bound the two main characters. To me, the axis was obvious.”

Imbert previously supervised animation on April and the Extraordinary World and Ernest and Célestine. In 2018, he co-directed The Big Bad Fox and Other Tales with Benjamin Renner, with whom he shared the César (the French Oscar) for Best Animated Movie. He is joined by co-writer Magali Pouzol, producer and co-writer Jean-Charles Ostorero, and producers Didier and Damien Brunner. The film features an original score by Amine Bouhafa, the French-Tunisian composer of César-winner “Timbuktu.”

Netflix will release “The Summit of the Gods” in select US theaters on November 24, in the UK on November 26, and on Netflix on November 30.