Made in Abyss and Other Anime Bullshit

I haven’t talked about anime much in a while, but I found a good one this year and therefore I thought hey, why not just do a barely-filtered blog post on all the anime I’ve been watching in general lately? So here we are.

I’ve been a poor anime devotee the past year, although, in my defence, there’ve been very few shows recently, especially this summer, that have caught my attention. My biggest failure of the past year is missing Boku no Hero Academia, whereby I’m only a few episodes into the first series, and I understand that it’s not only a top shonen but, by some accounts, a genuine heartbreaker, so I’ll be sure to follow through with that one. I also watched a paltry two episodes of the second series of Attack on Titan before it fell quickly to the wayside. I can’t quite explain why this is; maybe the cruelly long wait weakened the momentum so much that I’ve lost interest in the world that they built however many years ago. Yeah, yeah, I could go read the manga, but no. I’m an anime guy. Manga is for Berserk and absolutely nothing else.* Oh, and I’ve been watching Dragon Ball Super as well, naturally, but since I can’t bring myself to switch to the Japanese after many, many hours of the English cast, I’m slowly working my way through it as it sieves its way out, so no spoilers please, you fucks.

Speaking of Berserk, I have been watching the brand spanking new adaptation, carrying on (more or less) from where the original 1997 adaptation and the Studio 4°C films left off. Now, Berserk isn’t just one of my favourite anime of all time, or even one of the greatest anime of all time, but one of the greatest works of fiction ever made (at least the Golden Age arc as told by the original TV series), so I was understandably hyped as fuck to see some more Berserk out there, especially with material that finally entered the manga territory that I’ve been chugging through voraciously. But, now infamously, the series was a disaster. Total disaster. I don’t know what went wrong with it, I think the studio bit off more than they could chew with their stylistic choices, but man if that isn’t some of the worst 3D CGI I’ve ever seen outside of a PS2 cutscene. The new Berserk is clunkily animated, weirdly directed, and oddly censored (though this is a Japanese TV thing or something, I get it), and this makes it hardly worth watching, doing a great disservice to its source material.

The Berserk car-crash is, of course, a bit of a tragedy, but I’m not too fussed. Nothing in Berserk’s overall story beyond the Golden Age arc tops it, anyway. Berserk’s Golden Age arc is timeless, and its 90s TV adaptation is a masterpiece, yes, a fucking masterpiece that maybe wields the best narrative of any show that anime has to offer. Forever. No bullshit.

*Slight hyperbole

Old Stuff

There’s been a lot of little things I’ve been nibbling at from the past, such as Strike the Blood, the Fate series (yeesh), and Revolutionary Girl Utena, the latter of which will be finished at some point when I get my shit together, as it seems too much of a gem to miss out on. The two shows I did finish in the last year that came from the misty lands of the past couldn’t have been more different. The first was 2005’s Basilisk, which I’d watched before back in my formative anime-discovering teenage years but never really got that into, but a few months ago I absolutely caned it and watched it all in maybe a few days. I don’t even know why; there’s just something about its Romeo-and-Juliet storyline that kept me invested, and I guess I just wanted to see how one of the two warring medieval ninja clans (because, oh yeah, that’s what this series is about) would one-up the other episode by episode. Or maybe it was just the dopamine that was released whenever I’d next hear that fucking intro, which I never skipped once and still chuck on on a regular basis just because, I dunno, fuck, it’s got emosh singing, sick riffs, catchiness, epicness – everything you want from an anime intro. But yeah, really good show. Strong characters, strong tension; overall a solid ninja banger.

The other series I finished is the more recent Nichijou from 2011, a comedy anime, which is surprising for me to have finished as I’m not usually one for anime that’s lighter in tone, being black-hearted and sadistic as I am, but Nichijou fucking does it for me. It’s a tough one to recommend, seeing as while violence, misery and monster-battles are pretty universal, comedy needs a lot more context to build itself on, and foreign comedy, especially fucking Asian comedy, can be a little tough to catch on to as a British person. Even though I was pretty obsessed with this show for a good few weeks, I’m extremely hesitant to recommend this to anyone with any reservations about it. Because believe me, the Japaneseness here is immense – I’d be surprised if this is a show to get into if you’re not much of an anime fan, and a hefty percentage of it went completely over my head. But there’s something so fucking charming about the characters, the wit, the timing, the silliness, and by christ, the completely unnecessary overload of animation for mundane happenings, that caused me to fall in love with it. At least give it a go; here, try this, or this, but I don’t blame you if it’s not for you and I drop a few notches in your estimations of my personality.

New Stuff

Of all the anime that did come out this year, I also only managed to finish two of them… I think. I can’t remember. There’s been a lot of shit floating around that I’ve been dunking in and out of like an apple-bobber. But the two I definitely did watch came out the same time and finished around the same time, which is probably why I’m bothering to review them now, like the amateur blogger I am. The first one is a ridiculous piece of total nonsense while the other one will no doubt be a hot contender for anime of the year, maybe by some distance. We’ll see.

Anyway, the first one: Kakegurui (trailer). It’s one of those anime that’s set in a high school that nobody ever seems to leave, and all meaning and purpose in their lives is defined by their school life and everything outside school is completely irrelevant. This particular school, Hyakkaou Private Academy, has a social order completely defined by gambling – whoever wins the most climbs their way to the top of the bizarre hierarchy, while the bankrupt wander around with dog tags, living as pets or slaves to pay off their debts. It’s complete hokum from beginning to end, and, naturally, the whole thing is hypersexualised to a nuclear level, with the end credits beginning with a full screen of main character Yumeko’s swaggering boobage. Plus the whole strict-hierarchy thing gives the entire thing this kinky sadomasochistic aspect, and the thrill of gambling is, of course, represented by the characters getting off super hard on their own risk-taking, with much skirt grabbing and ecchi moaning going with it.

So why did I stick with this stupid show, rather than all the other ones that were out there? Well, first, it’s a twelve-episoder, so it wasn’t too hard to polish off, and although I’ve been very quick to berate it, it is highly entertaining. Every episode has the psychotic Yumeko battling her opponents at a number of high-risk and unusual games of chance, but the interest lies in its typically anime cerebral mind-chess, since everyone cheats at these games or have hidden tricks and methods or whatever, and occasionally you get this Jonathan Creek moment where you see exactly how the gears turned and how a character outsmarts their way to victory. And I like that! I haven’t enjoyed a good mental-chess anime since rewatching Death Note (and don’t get me started on that fucking Netflix remake… actually, maybe I will, even if it is low-hanging fruit).

Overall: pretty fun, plainly ridiculous, lots of nice direction, and great facial animation, my word, some of the faces the characters pull once they’ve got an ace up their sleeve are genuinely terrifying.

But now, the main event! Made in Abyss (trailer) is one of the most highly-rated series of the year, and it’s a very interesting combination of typical anime elements pieced together in a very atypical fashion.

Made in Abyss is set in this extremely high-concept world that could only exist for the sake of its story, a world where your everyday fantasy-land society have settled around this gargantuan hole in the ground that leads down into the titular abyss. Like Dante’s Inferno, undoubtedly the show’s inspiration, the abyss has several layers. Every now and then explorers venture down the abyss, bringing back otherworldly treasures and artefacts, arriving with great celebration and respect from the locals. There’s a school (obviously) for young explorers, attended by Riko, whose mother supposedly died deep in the Abyss and whom Riko wishes to emulate as a cave raider, and then, later, sets out to find after she becomes convinced of her survival.

Following her on this journey is Reg (with a hard ‘g’), who has absolutely no memory of who he is, what he is, where he’s from or anything except that he’s a robot ‘boy’ who can fire an extremely overpowered firebeam from his mechanical arm before passing out for about two hours (which comes in handy every now and then). Reg is himself a ‘relic’ of the Abyss, and follows Riko on her journey not just to protect her in that weird Japanese way, but to discover his own nature.

The Abyss itself is packed with problems, though. Not only is it filled with Lovecraftian beasts and alien monsters, but the further you go, the harder it is to return due to the so-called ‘Curse of the Abyss’, where re-ascension can cause bleeding, deformation and death. Even a short incline pushes Riko to exhaustion. This means that, technically, the two of them are on a journey of no return, one where, aside from a miracle, they will never return. Oh, except Reg, because, like, he’s a robot, but whatever.

It’s a shame that the series is only thirteen episodes long so far, including its feature-length finalé, as the entire time, even in the early episodes as they’re stumbling across long-forgotten skeletons, and later as they meet with other cave raiders who have gone a little cuckoo from their time in the Abyss (which is a lot more beautiful than it sounds, incidentally), you can just tell that there's tons of quandaries to be solved, weird mysteries that you want to know more about, like what are these relics? Who made them? And, which is of course the show’s greatest hook, what truly lies at the bottom of the Abyss?

What I love about Made in Abyss is how it mixes moe (big, cute eyes, cartoony, colourful world) with the dark side of survival, and genuine moral disturbances. It first appears adorable, starring two little kids adventuring like the Goonies down a big well of flowers and some scary monsters but plenty of beauty. And then, as anything involving an abyss should well lead to, things get darker and darker. There’s creepiness and peril throughout, but the latter few episodes are geninely painful to watch, for various reasons, and Nanachi, the weird rabbity person they come across, has a backstory – and a conclusion to that backstory – that, yes, made me cry. I cried fucking shitloads at the end of Made in Abyss. There’s a Fullmetal Alchemist quality to it – a Saturday-morning cartoon on the surface that delves into genuine horror, and the ending left me disturbed, heartbroken and hopeful all at the same time, which is pretty fucking impressive for any show, let alone one with a weird rabbity person.

It’s not perfect. The pacing can be strange (like when they learn to survive in the wilderness within maybe less than an episode), and there’s, wait for it, a weird sexual tension going on between the two twelve-year old main characters that I can’t tell is either cute or creepy. But, still, you need to watch it. Or at least try it. At the moment I’ve started watching The Ancient Magus’ Bride, which has been hyped and looks like it has the potential for a similar mix of fantastical wonder and interpersonal heart-clenching, but for the time being: Made in Abyss is the series of the year. It’s pure, unadulterated, fantastical, imaginative, sensitive, spectacular anime at its finest, and I hope, I hope, I hope that it only gets better from here.