Atom The Beginning Anime Casts After the Rain Duo as Guest Voice Cast

The official website of for the television anime adaptation of Tetsuro Kasahara's Atom The Beginning manga announced on Monday that Soraru and Mafumafu, the two members of musical duo After the Rain, will appear as guest voice cast in the anime's fourth episode on Saturday.

After the Rain also performs the anime's opening theme song "Kaidoku Funō" (Indecipherable).

The series premiered on April 15 on NHK. The first episode then streamed on Amazon Prime Video in Japan on April 16. The anime will have 12 episodes. Sentai Filmworks licensed the anime, and is streaming the anime as it airs in Japan in Amazon's Anime Strike channel.

Atom The Beginning's story takes place in Japan after a great calamity. There were two geniuses who dreamed of the future. One was Umatarō Tenma. The other was Hiroshi Ochanomizu. The two labored day and night in robot research — Tenma to create a "god," and Ochanomizu to create a "friend." Thus a robot, A106, was born from their collaborative friendship. Would A106 really become a god, or a friend? The manga and anime tell a prequel story leading up to the birth of Astro Boy.

Katsuyuki Motohiro (Psycho-Pass, live-action Ajin film) is serving as chief director, and Tatsuo Sato (Bodacious Space Pirates, Martian Successor Nadesico) is directing the series in cooperation with Tezuka Productions. Osamu Tezuka's son, Makoto Tezuka, is in charge of project planning cooperation and supervision, and Masami Yuuki (Patlabor franchise, Birdy the Mighty) is credited with concept works. OLM, Production I.G, and Signal.MD are animating the series.

Jun'ichi Fujisaku (Blood+, Appleseed XIII) is overseeing the series scripts, and Takahiro Yoshimatsu (Trigun, Basquash!) is the character designer. AI researchers Hitoshi Matsubara (Future University Hakodate professor), Satoshi Kurihara (The University of Electro-Communications, Artificial Intelligence eXploration Research Center president), Hiroshi Yamakawa (Dwango Artificial Intelligence Laboratory head), and Yutaka Matsuo (University of Tokyo special associate professor) are supervising the anime. Yoshino Nanjō is performing the ending theme song "Hikari no Hajimari" (The Beginning of Light).​