Oku Wants You in a Theater Seat This Time
Hiroya Oku's own reaction may be the best part of the announcement. In a post on his X account, the Gantz and Inuyashiki creator called the project "good news for the people who had given up," and asked fans who never made it to a theater for GANTZ:O or Inuyashiki to show up this time.
GIGANT finished its run in 2021 and, until now, was a rare Oku series without an adaptation attached. According to Comic Natalie, a Japanese entertainment news site, the film was unveiled at K2 Pictures' lineup press conference during the Cannes Film Festival, where it stood out as the only animated project on the slate.
An Adult-Film Star Who Grows to Kaiju Size
GIGANT is a peak Oku premise. High schooler and aspiring filmmaker Rei Yokoyamada crosses paths with Chiho "Papico" Johansson, an adult-film actress living in his neighborhood. She gains the ability to grow to giant size and ends up defending Tokyo from monstrous threats to protect the person she loves. Comic Natalie bills it as "sci-fi sexy heroine action," and the danger has a nasty internet-age twist: the manga's disasters are crowdsourced through an anonymous voting site where users wish catastrophes into existence.
The manga ran in Shogakukan's seinen magazine Big Comic Superior from December 2017 to September 2021 and is complete in 10 volumes. Seven Seas Entertainment publishes the full series in English, so international readers can binge the source material before a single frame of the film arrives.
K2 Pictures Makes Its First Move Into Animation
GIGANT is the first animated feature from K2 Pictures, the film company founded in 2023 and led by Muneyuki Kii. Its first fund, K2P Film Fund I, closed in February 2026 at roughly ¥5 billion (about $33 million), and the GIGANT film was announced as one of ten projects at the company's "Lineup Announcement 2026 in Cannes" event on May 17.
The rest of that slate shows how wide K2 is swinging. It includes a musical film adaptation of Osamu Tezuka's The Book of Human Insects directed by Ken Ninomiya, a Takashi Miike documentary about kabuki actor Ichikawa Danjūrō XIII premiering in September 2026, and a new action film from Keishi Otomo. The company is also behind the live-action adaptation of Tatsuki Fujimoto's Look Back.
For GIGANT specifically, the announcement stopped at the title. No director, screenwriter, or animation studio was named, which means the biggest question about the film (who actually draws a skyscraper-sized Papico) is still open.
Looking Ahead
There is no release window, and no international distributor or streaming partner has been announced. The next concrete milestone to watch for is a staff reveal, since the studio and director will tell us far more about the film's ambitions than the announcement itself did.
In the meantime, the manga is the way in. All 10 volumes of GIGANT are available in English from Seven Seas, and Oku's back catalog explains exactly why fans are curious: this is the artist whose hyper-detailed sci-fi action made Gantz a genre landmark, finally getting a theatrical anime built around his strangest heroine.