3 out of 5

Directed by: Hiroaki Ando

covers season 1

It’s so satisfying catching up with a creator. Of course, it’s super cool if you’re in on the ground floor, and maybe you discover something way after the fact and there’s a certain conclusiveness there – you can see the whole scope of their work – but, personally, I love the anticipation of finding a creator mid-swing, when there’s enough material to reflect on, and more to look forward to. With Tsutomu Nihei, I saw references to Blame! as soon as I started reading manga, but it was the look and feel of Netflix’s Knights of Sidonia that fully convinced me, and I’ve been playing catch up most of the time since – trying to read as much of his work as I could, and waiting to finish KoS until I’d read the source material. Finally, with the publication of Aposimz, I was experiencing his work as it was translated and released, and now I feel there’s a new milestone with Kaina of the Great Snow Sea: Tsutomu’s first (I believe?) anime-first series, working with his usual Polygon mates, and even sitting back on art duties for the manga adaptation.

And while Nihei isn’t credited with writing on the show, his creator-marks are all over this thing, from the strange but particular world design, to the fascination with minutiae, the themes of long dead cultures and a mash-up of organics with tech, and, of course, special nods to Toha Heavy Industries, and a little blurb about how people have to pee in this sci-fi world.

But: we’ll note that, KoS aside, despite Nihei creating some landmark works, we haven’t seen many full-on anime adaptations of those. Given how often we see material translated back and forth between the mediums – that it’s baked into the creative process, somewhat – I think an opinion can develop that that translation always works, but of course it doesn’t: some things work better in one form or another, and sometimes the translation bests the original version. Polygon’s stiff CGI style (at the time) worked well for Sidonia, and that was a pretty ideal cross-section of shonen stuff and huge-scale sci-fi to work on both page and screen; I don’t know if any of Nihei’s other stuff would work well animated – perhaps hence the reason for boiling Blame! down to a one-shot – and I don’t know if this initial anime-first bid necessarily works super well either.

The pieces do: a scattered society, living on what seems like a giant canopy; and far below, on a “snow sea,” another scattered society; unawares of each other, but linked by dwindling resources. Up above, we have Kaina (Yoshimasa Hosoya), the only youth in his community, and trying to learn the ancient art of “reading” – via what looks like a collection of aged street and shop signs – from the local old, kooky dude. The sky society seems peaceful and sedate to a fault, contrasted with down below, where Ririha (Rie Takahashi) lives in Atland, one of the holdouts against the roving, conquering Valghans, who’ve been taking over cities one by one, and taking their water. A last big attempt at solving this ongoing war, by contacting the rumored “sage,” brings Ririha floating up into the canopy, surprised to discover Kaina and his peoples. The threads of our story come together: what can these two learn from one another to stop the fighting, and potentially save the world? And what does this odd, mushroom-looking glowy creature that shows up periodically have to do with anything?

The meetcute is fun; both Kaina and Ririha are typical do-good protags, but there’s enough meat to the adventure to give them dimension, and their voice actors are excellent. The pacing – ascent to the sky; descent to the sky; a kidnap and rescue and a final battle – is quite perfect as well, using the series’ 11-episodes effectively to keep story developments happening, without pausing the ever-approaching Valghan threat. In anime in general, a lot of the unexplained world-building we see here is expected: things just happen, and we go with it. That said, Nihei’s constructions are often different in this regard, following an internal logic that extrapolates from reality, as opposed to templates – i.e. isekai stuff; RPG stuff – that’s lain atop of many shows. Sidonia was purposefully a bit more explicit with its hard science, which is why that made sense as a show; but the obliqueness of the Blame! and Aposimz (and other) worlds requires a sense of wonder and scale that the adventure tone of this show can’t quite serve. And while Polygon has very much stepped up their game with more fluid animation, obscuring the CG aspect of it, the direction does not define the size of Kaina’s world effectively; it seems too easy to cross from snow to sky, and revelations about the world require speculation as to why such things hadn’t previously been discovered. This can be a part of Nihei’s work for sure, but in text / picture form, the reader is allowed to explore panels and between panels on their own, whereas anime is a guided tour. Similarly, the logic of the world – what the “snow” is, for example – while not needing outright explanation, needs more consistency in presentation. In other words, without knowledge of the creator, who we can trust to have some thoughts as to how these bits and pieces function, this all feels rather random, and weightless. And interesting, for sure, but moreso as a backdrop to – with those details stripped away – is something of a typical adventure tale.

Well told, well acted, well animated; all great things. But this is one I maybe look forward to reading.