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Made in Abyss, again
Jul. 27th, 2022 08:32 pmSo back in 2018 when I watched the first season of the anime Made in Abyss (2017), I wrote it up (bottom review in the post) as a work which I thought had a great deal of value, but which is also inherently from a narrative viewpoint that is so disturbing that I completely understood why a person might not want to watch it.
TL;DR:
-- stunning art that ranges from Ghibli to Giger within seconds
-- some of the best fantasy worldbuilding I have ever encountered (in anime I have seen to date, it is beaten only by One Piece)
-- the best score and incidental music of its year and several years surrounding it, by Kevin Penkin
-- great character writing, with a real sense of stakes and difficulty and kid protagonists who behave like real kids
-- a narrative gaze that is, although no character in S1 has these tendencies in any way, fetishistically pedophilic to the point of being intensely, uncomfortably obvious
-- a narrative delight and revelry in the injury and pain of its protagonists
And I said I'd watch season two when it came out.
In between 2018 and now, three feature-length Made in Abyss movies were released, and for various reasons I did not watch any of them at the time. Season two, Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, is airing now. The week before the first episode came out, I watched all three films in order to make sure I was caught up.
The thing is, most feature films associated with television anime traditionally do not advance the plots of the shows. Either they're stand-alone, non-canon adventures not meant to have any effect on the television status quo, or they're artistically re-cut versions of the actual TV anime. These are intended to showcase the prettiest shots and give the casual viewer enough information to step into the show at the next airing season, with a couple of short new scenes added to satisfy the existing fanbase. In other words, inessential, and not necessarily much resembling what many people think of as a feature film.
In recent years, this has started to change. The Shounen Jump darling Demon Slayer found itself with a very awkward amount of manga left to adapt given the timing of when the anime seasons aired versus when the manga came out, and somebody also realized that there were some fight scenes that could really use a larger screen and the budget that gets devoted to a theatrical release. All right, they thought, maybe we can make our existing audience go to a theatre or risk missing plot. It was one of the hottest manga franchises in Japan at the time, so they decided to take the risk-- and Demon Slayer: Infinity Train was beyond a smash hit. It racked up box office numbers legitimately comparable to things like the Japanese release of Titanic. Audiences loved the quickened pacing and ludicrously pretty animation. And other anime series have begun to follow suit; earlier this year, for example, I watched Jujutsu Kaisen 0, another Shounen Jump movie which neatly solved the problem of adapting a prequel/side story that would have completely derailed the pacing of the anime of that particular property, but which the series' fans really wanted to see adapted.
The first two Made in Abyss features are standard old-school re-cuts of the first anime season. I watched them because I had not rewatched the show since originally seeing it, and I kind of get the point of doing this? It certainly freshened my memory. I would not have wanted to pay theatre prices, and of course a lot of the finer details got glossed over, but I remembered those finer details better for having seen the major points go by again.
The third Made in Abyss feature film, Dawn of the Deep Soul (2019), is plot, and must be watched between S1 and S2 in order for S2 to make any sense.
( I'm going to cut this here, because I suspect this will be long. Also, it gets kind of heavy. )
TL;DR:
-- stunning art that ranges from Ghibli to Giger within seconds
-- some of the best fantasy worldbuilding I have ever encountered (in anime I have seen to date, it is beaten only by One Piece)
-- the best score and incidental music of its year and several years surrounding it, by Kevin Penkin
-- great character writing, with a real sense of stakes and difficulty and kid protagonists who behave like real kids
-- a narrative gaze that is, although no character in S1 has these tendencies in any way, fetishistically pedophilic to the point of being intensely, uncomfortably obvious
-- a narrative delight and revelry in the injury and pain of its protagonists
And I said I'd watch season two when it came out.
In between 2018 and now, three feature-length Made in Abyss movies were released, and for various reasons I did not watch any of them at the time. Season two, Made in Abyss: The Golden City of the Scorching Sun, is airing now. The week before the first episode came out, I watched all three films in order to make sure I was caught up.
The thing is, most feature films associated with television anime traditionally do not advance the plots of the shows. Either they're stand-alone, non-canon adventures not meant to have any effect on the television status quo, or they're artistically re-cut versions of the actual TV anime. These are intended to showcase the prettiest shots and give the casual viewer enough information to step into the show at the next airing season, with a couple of short new scenes added to satisfy the existing fanbase. In other words, inessential, and not necessarily much resembling what many people think of as a feature film.
In recent years, this has started to change. The Shounen Jump darling Demon Slayer found itself with a very awkward amount of manga left to adapt given the timing of when the anime seasons aired versus when the manga came out, and somebody also realized that there were some fight scenes that could really use a larger screen and the budget that gets devoted to a theatrical release. All right, they thought, maybe we can make our existing audience go to a theatre or risk missing plot. It was one of the hottest manga franchises in Japan at the time, so they decided to take the risk-- and Demon Slayer: Infinity Train was beyond a smash hit. It racked up box office numbers legitimately comparable to things like the Japanese release of Titanic. Audiences loved the quickened pacing and ludicrously pretty animation. And other anime series have begun to follow suit; earlier this year, for example, I watched Jujutsu Kaisen 0, another Shounen Jump movie which neatly solved the problem of adapting a prequel/side story that would have completely derailed the pacing of the anime of that particular property, but which the series' fans really wanted to see adapted.
The first two Made in Abyss features are standard old-school re-cuts of the first anime season. I watched them because I had not rewatched the show since originally seeing it, and I kind of get the point of doing this? It certainly freshened my memory. I would not have wanted to pay theatre prices, and of course a lot of the finer details got glossed over, but I remembered those finer details better for having seen the major points go by again.
The third Made in Abyss feature film, Dawn of the Deep Soul (2019), is plot, and must be watched between S1 and S2 in order for S2 to make any sense.
( I'm going to cut this here, because I suspect this will be long. Also, it gets kind of heavy. )
