3 out of 5

Directed by: Mamoru Kanbe

covers season 1

Perpetually existing on the edge of shark-jumping; delivered in repetitive, overwrought dialogue; reliance on distractingly odd camera angles to force tension; these are all issues which plague The Promised Neverland… the manga.  Kaiu Shirai’s and Posuka Demizu’s fantasy horror tale fitfully stumbled through some admittedly occasionally super tense initial tankobons worth of material before succumbing to the ebbing sensibility that the narrative was flying by the seat of its pants; leads Emma, Norman, and Ray would have these really meticulous conversations that twist-turn conceptually sentence by sentence… and then repeat some past, less notable conversations, the illustrations similarly flashing back to those scenes.  A very explicit example of wheel spinning.

But again, the core premise was (initially) rather addictive: (spoilers for the first episode / first book) that an orphanage, somewhat oddly isolated from the world by a surrounding forest and, beyond that, a wall, turns out to actually be a “farm” for raising the kids to have intelligent, snack-worthy brains for demon overlords; discovering this, our lead kids plot escape, thwarted along the way by the orphanage’s ‘mother’ and, perhaps, whatever threats may lay beyond the wall…

The problem, of course, was what to do when that problem was surmounted, and though credit to Shirai for not dragging that out and doing it sooner rather than later, after that point, the quirkiness and thrills wended into the nature of the story soon dissipated.

Now, fair enough: the anime adaptation of the series hasn’t gotten to that point yet.  It might face the same fate when it does.  But: all of the problems mentioned above have been vastly diminished by the show’s style, which necessarily ditches the let’s-review-the-scene-that-just-happened tendency of the book for a more straight forward telling, and while keeping Demizu’s expressive characters – matching them to perfectly suited voice actors – the fish-eye and super-distorted angles are also abandoned for a noir, shadowed look that, as a result, also switches out that overwroughtness for a more compellingly mysterious vibe.

Combined with the momentum of the base story, the 12 episode first season of the show is madly exciting, with the fluid, humanistic animation shown in CloverWorks / A-1 studios’ past works.

So I have some faith here, that adapting the series in retrospect, having already improved on its better chapters, might pull off something similar in the shark-jumping to come.  Beyond its first episode surprise, there’s nothing really mind-boggling about the show itself, and one thing that does remain similar to the book’s telling is that the show skips over a lot of the psychological implications of the vague, demon-populated world it starts to build, and substitutes characters acting cryptic or odd instead of giving them actual personalities, but… while the manga had me reading subsequent volumes always halfway to ditching the series, I’m looking forward to The Promised Neverland, the anime, season 2.