Meiji Gekken: 1874 (Lost/Unreleased Crunchyroll anime)

UPDATE #1: I spent last night digging through LinkedIn profiles with keywords such as "crunchyroll originals", "crunchyroll original", "crunchyroll yapiko", and "yapiko animation". I found another person who was attached to the series: Jennifer Coluccio. In her LinkedIn profile she lists the series in the "Researcher / Writer: Freelance" section under Experience. What's peculiar is that she credits the series as "Meiji Gekkan: 1847 - CrunchyRoll / Warner Media". I don't know if this is an error (leaning more towards this) or if it's another alternate title that popped up during production. 

Moreover, looking up "yapiko animation" led me to an artist who worked on the series by the name of Jerome Perrillat-Collomb. According to their LinkedIn profile, they worked at Yapiko Animation in July 2019 on a series named 明治撃剱アウトローズ.  Upon Googling the name I discovered his Twitter, which then led me to his personal website that contained more photos of key animation (shown below). On Jerome's website, he lists the English title as "Meiji Attack Outlaws", but the translation that Google provides for "明治撃剱アウトローズ" comes out as "Meiji Gekiken Outlaws". I searched up the first four kanji letters of the title but turned up nothing about the anime. I also tried searching the other awkward translations for "Gekken", but no dice. Even if the translations muddy up my research, I lean towards these images being more material of the show. IMO, the eyes shown in the boards look somewhat similar to the few pieces of official art we have.

Finally, I discovered another artist named Melvin Limoge who also worked at Yapiko Animation between February 2019 to August 2019. The description he put under this on his LinkedIn page reads: "Décors couleurs de références sur une série pour la plateforme Crunchyroll". Melvin doesn't specify what series this was, but going by Callum May's article about Meiji Gekken (production took place between 2018-2020), the timing of his employment places him right in the middle of Meiji Gekken's development. This is all assumption on my end, which is why I sent Melvin an email asking him about it. I'll post another update if he responds. I will also contact other members who I found.

Below are the photos found on Jerome's website.

Now this is a quality lost media thread! Thank you for sharing all of the research you've done. It'd be great if theory 1 or 2 is true but as you explained it seems much for likely that your 3rd theory is correct. It's a real shame considering how much concept art and more can be found of Meiji Gekken: 1874, the people that worked on it clearly wanted to make something great. I hope I can help find information about Meiji Gekken: 1874 too and that this topic gets more attention in the community.

Hi LMW forums! Back for a long overdue update. I've yet to write a LMW article about Meiji Gekken as I've been busy these last few months. I did write a Reddit post about the anime which you can find here.

As it turns out background designer Pierre Pecoraro posted backgrounds on Instagram back in September. Some of the photos come with captions that mention "Meiji period" and one of the background posts is captioned with "Background from the time I worked in Tokyo Art direction @yannrugaru". @yannrugaru is the Instagram handle for Yann Le Gall, who also shared several backgrounds on his account between March and October of this year. These backgrounds too contain references to the Meiji period. 

The photos attached to this post are from Pierre Pecoraro's account. I will be posting Yann Le Gall's backgrounds separately due to the image limit. I wasn't able to ask Pierre or Yann about these backgrounds or Meiji Gekken as my burner Instagram account was deleted. Thankfully I was able to nab these backgrounds before that occurred.

More from Yann Le Gall's Instagram. Pictures 5-7 feature the background that can be seen in the Crunchyroll Originals trailer.

Yesterday I finally got a Twitter DM from Yann Le Gall. I messaged him a while ago but never received a response. It wasn't until I tagged him on Twitter that he responded. Here's what he said:

"Hi



Sorry for the (very) late reply.

I appreciate your concern about the Meiji Gekken project. I don’t really have any precise idea about what happened to it. I was only hired as a freelance background director and had to leave the project a bit before its completion. From what I know the project has been completed and delivered, but it seems that Crunchyroll just shelved it somehow?


Best info you could get would be to ask directly to Crunchyroll.

I really appreciate that some people seems to care about this project. I hope that CR will release it someday but it seems very unlikely unfortunately"


The last part in his first DM got my attention. Was Meiji Gekken: 1874 actually completed? And if it was, why did Crunchyroll choose to shelve it? My speculation:

The series was complete but due to the FUNimation/Crunchyroll merger and a management shakeup, the series might have been deemed a financial risk and was simply shelved.

This is just my own speculation and I hope we find out some day the real reason why the series was shelved.