Kojima Productions released the first teaser for “Death Stranding Isolations” and a new poster on October 30th, Japan time. The 45-second video went up on the studio’s official YouTube channel. It is the first footage from the animated series, which the studio announced on November 13th, 2025, at a Disney+ event at Hong Kong Disneyland Resort. The video’s description says the series will be “streaming exclusively on Disney+ or other Disney Services in 2027”, but no release date has been given.
Takayuki Sano directs and Hideo Kojima is executive producer. E&H Production animates the series by hand in 2D, and Kojima Productions calls it an up-and-coming studio and Sano one of its own. The studio’s earlier work includes “Ninja Kamui”, “Bullet/Bullet” and the television series “Magic Knight Rayearth”. Sano’s own credits include “Jujutsu Kaisen 0” and the final season of “Attack on Titan”. Ilya Kuvshinov is credited with the original character design. He was the character designer on “Ghost in the Shell: SAC_2045”. Kojima Productions calls the series all-new, with an original story in the “Death Stranding” world. It is set in North America just after the games’ hero Sam reconnects the continent through the Chiral Network.
At the Disney+ Originals Preview in 2025, Kojima and Sano appeared on stage together and called Disney+ their first partnership with a global streaming platform. The studio revealed new concept art by Kuvshinov, and the series carried a “(Working Title)” tag. According to Insider Gaming, Kojima told the room that “I grew up loving Japanese anime, and it has shaped my worldview”, and that he chose to work with Disney when the company approached him. The announcement page said the series would “follow a young man and woman as they set out on an adventure.” Its synopsis set the story “just as Sam Bridges walks through the continent”, where the October synopsis moves it later, to just after the reconnection. The only face in the teaser belongs to a girl. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for everything the “Death Stranding Isolations” teaser shows, shot by shot.
The only face in the teaser belongs to a girl.”
It opens on a Disney+ logo with the words “now has” beneath it, then a Hulu logo. A Kojima Productions logo on black dissolves into a pale and misty landscape, and a large E&H Production card sits over the same mist. The first real shot is a lone figure in dark gear with a big cargo pack, seen from behind on a rocky ledge above a vast crater. A thin blue beam of light rises from a small boxy object on the crater floor, and the shot holds for about four seconds. A dim interior follows. A white figurine there holds a pennant marked “Kojima Productions” beside two green cans, and a blue holographic shape on a dome base brightens next to them.
Then the camera finds a girl asleep on a bed. It starts on her legs in green trousers and moves up past her white tank top and spread blonde hair. A visor with a glowing orange “SLEEP” readout covers her eyes, and her mouth hangs open. The picture then breaks for under a second as black handprints smear across a pale and scratched surface, cut with flashes of glowing white ones. A close-up of the visor holds on the letters for two seconds, and a burst of digital static follows. A crowd of glossy black hands then reaches upward out of near darkness, behind an orange-red bar.
The next shot runs six seconds and looks up from behind a high-backed seat in a dim room. Green toy figures sit on a shelf at left and a framed picture hangs at right. The room stays still for the first couple of seconds. Then a hooded figure with a black void for a face rises behind the seat in a red coat edged with blue static. It swells until the coat fills the frame. The picture goes black for two seconds, and the sound drops out for most of them. A flash of static leads into a close-up of black glossy shapes with hollow mouth-like openings. Then the girl is awake and pulls the visor off with her hair whipping. She stares into the lens with wide green eyes and her mouth open. A white streak runs through her blonde bangs, and a shelf of toy soldiers sits behind her.
The title card is black, with a Hulu wordmark above widely spaced white letters that spell “DEATH STRANDING”, and “ISOLATIONS” fades in underneath. A credits card follows and lists Tow Ubukata for series composition and screenplay and Sayaka Koiso as character designer, besides Kojima, Sano and Kuvshinov. It also names Yann Le Gall as color script and art director, Keisuke Yanagi as editor and Shuhei Abe as sound director. A card reading “2027 COMING SOON” comes next. The last card is a Hulu logo that gives way to a Disney+ logo. Kojima Productions’ own description still names only “Disney+ or other Disney Services” as the platform.
The new poster drops the pair from the November 2025 art, two characters on a purple backdrop with “(WORKING TITLE)” in small type under the logo. This one shows a single character. She has blonde hair with a white streak in the bangs and green eyes, the same as the girl in the teaser, and wears a teal bodysuit with goggles at her collar. She stands before a motorcycle-like machine with glowing blue wheel rims, beside a small legged robot with one red lens, in front of a cratered plain and snow-capped mountains. The teaser’s title card carries no working-title tag.
The synopsis gives the four new characters a line each, and none has a name. The old man is wise and connects people through a method that defies all reckoning. The soldier is a woman stuck in a cycle of war and destruction. The boy seethes with rage at the absurdity of his life. The girl was forced into isolation and soon grows to prefer solitude. Chance encounters launch her into a world she does not recognize. The November 2025 version described the same four more narrowly. It had an old man seeking salvation outside the connection advocated by Bridges, a female warrior who tries to kickstart a world of constant fighting and a boy with a grudge against Bridges.
The series is one of several “Death Stranding” projects beyond the games. In the games, Sam is the protagonist, and “Death Stranding 2: On the Beach” launched on PlayStation 5 on June 26th, 2025. Kojima Productions is also making an animated film, “Death Stranding: Mosquito”. ABC Animation’s Hiroshi Miyamoto directs it from a script by Aaron Guzikowski. That film is a separate project from “Isolations”. A live-action film at A24 is also in the works, with Michael Sarnoski, the director of “A Quiet Place: Day One”, named to direct it. Engadget reports that Kojima said in 2023 that he aims to “present a new dimension of cinematic adaptation that goes beyond merely turning a game into a live-action movie.”
The teaser sets a mood and holds back the rest, and nobody on screen is named. The old man, the soldier and the boy are not identified, and nothing in the footage names the figure on the ledge. Between the visor and the wake-up, the footage reads as a nightmare. In the games, Sam’s job was to reconnect people in the hope of saving them. Kojima Productions says the renewed connections now bring “new and unforeseen consequences”, and the teaser puts that tension in one girl’s face.
What Do You Think? Does a teaser built around one girl’s bad night tell you enough about where the series is headed? Would you rather see Sam in the story or is a new cast the right way to widen the world? And are you willing to wait until 2027 with no release date?
See you on the next binge!
