Anime director Yûki Igarashi, known for his work on Star Wars: Visions, has spoken to Collider's Steven Weintraub about his feature directorial debut, The Ribbon Hero, a new film coming to Netflix. The film is inspired by Osamu Tezuka's foundational 1953 manga Princess Knight, and recently had an early preview at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival as part of Netflix's anime showcase. The project matters as the first major feature from Igarashi's animation studio, Outline, and as a modern reinterpretation of a work widely credited with pioneering the fighting-heroine genre.

The film follows Princess Sapphire, whose kingdom of Shiverland is devastated by a catastrophe called "Nergal"; rather than accept her fate, she battles monsters, or kaiju, to determine her own destiny. Igarashi says the story is thematically "inspired by" the original rather than a direct adaptation, drawing on modern themes such as COVID and disasters through a fantasy lens. He explains that his Star Wars: Visions experience taught him how to handle a long-standing property that has been repeatedly reimagined, and that scattering ribbons in Sapphire's fights are used to convey her emotions. He also names Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind as his current favourite Hayao Miyazaki film.