Adult Swim’s new rooster-battling anime is the perfect fix for Attack on Titan fans

Rooster Fighter—the highly anticipated animated rendition of Shu Sakuratani’s surreal manga series—is officially slated to storm Adult Swim this March.

The series chronicles the high-octane exploits of Keiji, a wandering avian hero who is far more than a standard farm bird. Acting as humanity’s unlikely vanguard, Keiji hunts the grotesque, towering entities that have begun to terrorize civilization, dispatching them with surgical precision and lethal pecks. For those who have ever pondered what Attack on Titan might look like if the Survey Corps were replaced by a single, stoic chicken, this series offers a definitive and action-packed answer.

“Rooster Fighter is the type of production that immediately addresses the premise of ‘what if a bird did it?’ and leans in completely,” remarked Adult Swim president Michael Ouweleen. “It is absurd, surprisingly sincere, and overflowing with high-stakes, talon-powered combat.”

Essentially, the show reimagines the apocalyptic tension of a titan invasion through a feathered lens, creating a spectacle that is as brilliant as it is bizarre.

To herald the 12-episode season, Adult Swim unveiled a teaser trailer showcasing Keiji’s martial prowess. The footage depicts the hero leaping onto a demonic colossus, delivering a devastating strike to its cornea, and sticking a perfect landing on his claws. Before finishing the encounter, he unleashes his signature war cry: “Kokekokkō!”—the Japanese equivalent of a morning crow, re-imagined here as a shout of absolute victory.

This premiere represents another major exclusive for Adult Swim, as the network continues to carve out a unique space for anime outside the ecosystems of streaming giants like Netflix or Crunchyroll. Adult Swim’s recent exclusive ventures have met with varying degrees of success; while the adaptation of Junji Ito’s horror masterpiece Uzumaki struggled with production hurdles and visual inconsistencies, Shinichiro Watanabe’s Lazarus earned critical acclaim, even as it faced the daunting task of living up to the legacy of Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo.

The English dub of Rooster Fighter is scheduled to premiere on Adult Swim at 12 AM on March 14, with new episodes arriving every Saturday night.

Source: Polygon