Night Raid 1931

Night Raid 1931 is the second project in the 'Anime no Chikara' original anime initiative by TV Tokyo and Aniplex, following Sora no Woto. Unlike the other two Anime no Chikara series, it never received a manga adaptation.

The title 'Night Raid' was coined to evoke espionage imagery meaning 'night attack', while the Japanese prefix 'Senko' (flash) was chosen to represent the characters' psychic 'special abilities'.

Production was extremely rushed: at the time Sora no Woto ended its broadcast and previewed Night Raid 1931 as the next show, the first episode was still unfinished, forcing footage of staff meetings and production work to be used as filler in promotional CMs due to a shortage of completed animation.

The first episode was completed less than a week before its scheduled air date after the production schedule had to be adjusted.

The show was originally slated to be the third Anime no Chikara project but swapped broadcast order with Occult Academy due to various circumstances.

Because the story is set in a multilingual 1930s Shanghai, the voice cast recorded dialogue in multiple languages under language coaching, with Hiroyuki Yoshino, Yoshiko Ikuta and Daisuke Namikawa reporting particular difficulty mastering subtle Chinese pronunciation; Saki Fujita said that after her Chinese recording sessions her native Japanese pronunciation became temporarily shaky.

Episode 7 ('Incident'), set on the eve of the Mukden Incident, was pulled from television and BS broadcast for unspecified reasons and instead streamed exclusively on the official website via Bandai Channel, with a special compilation episode aired in its place.

Several episodes (0, 7, and 14, plus the special 'Devil of the Opium Den') were produced but never broadcast on TV, being included only on the Blu-ray and DVD releases; episode 14 was confirmed to be in production only after the TV broadcast had ended.

The score includes an instrumental violin arrangement of Sergei Rachmaninoff's 'Vocalise', originally a vocal piece, used as an in-story musical performance.

The series' setting is grounded in real history, depicting pre-World War II Shanghai, the Kwantung Army, the Mukden Incident, the founding of Manchukuo, and the February 26 Incident, while featuring real historical figures such as Kanji Ishiwara, Seishiro Itagaki, and Puyi alongside fictional characters; each episode ends with a disclaimer noting it is a fictional interpretation and not new historical scholarship.

Sentai Filmworks licensed the series for North American Blu-ray and DVD release in August 2011, though that license later expired in 2018.

Anime News Network critics compared the show favorably to pulp espionage fiction like Ian Fleming's works and to Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, praising its noir atmosphere and action scenes, though some felt the exposition was hard to follow and the musical score inconsistent.